Two brothers, a bakery and a steam biscuit factory.

Jacob’s began in Waterford, in the south-east of Ireland, as a small bakery making bread and ship’s biscuits run by William Beale Jacob, English Wikipedia says. In 1851 his brother Robert joined him and the partnership took the name W. & R. Jacob. That is the year the brand counts from: the Irish Jacob’s website calls its biscuits “the original, the best since 1851” and its founders “two guys from Waterford.” Wikipedia’s article on pladis, the brand’s UK owner, describes the brothers as Quakers. The brand marks its 175th anniversary in 2026.

The business soon moved to the capital. In 1852 the brothers took premises on Peter’s Row in Dublin, and in 1853 they opened W. & R. Jacob’s Steam Biscuit Factory there, according to English Wikipedia; the works grew into a large site in the south inner city on Bishop Street. The product now most associated with the name came later. English Wikipedia’s article on the cream cracker credits its invention to Joseph Haughton, at his home in Dublin, and says William Jacob began manufacturing it in a small bakery around 1885.

The Dublin factory also has a place in Irish labour and political history. The trade unionist Rosie Hackett worked at Jacob’s; in August 1911 she helped organise a walkout by women workers in support of men already on strike, and during the 1913 Lockout Jacob’s workers came out in solidarity with others and were in turn locked out by their employers, English Wikipedia says. In the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish Volunteers’ 2nd Battalion, about 200 men under Thomas MacDonagh, gathered at St Stephen’s Green with orders to take “Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, Bishop Street,” according to Wikipedia’s account of the Rising’s first day, and the factory became one of the rebel garrisons. The site is now home to the National Archives of Ireland, which moved to Bishop Street in 1991.

Two factories, one name, then two owners.

Jacob’s crossed the Irish Sea before Irish independence. Its first English factory opened in 1914 at Aintree, on the edge of Liverpool, English Wikipedia says. In 1922 a separate English company was formed: the Dublin business kept the name W. & R. Jacob, while the Liverpool branch became Jacob’s Bakery Ltd. From then on the two halves followed different paths through decades of mergers.

In Britain, Jacob’s Bakery joined Associated Biscuits in 1960; Nabisco bought Associated Biscuits in 1982, and Danone acquired it in 1989, renaming the business The Jacob’s Bakery Ltd. In Ireland, W. & R. Jacob merged with Boland’s Bakery in the 1970s to form Irish Biscuits Ltd, which moved in 1973 to a factory at Tallaght in south Dublin. Danone bought Irish Biscuits in 1991, putting both halves under one owner again, English Wikipedia says.

That reunion lasted until 2004. Danone first agreed to sell its Jacob’s Biscuit Group to United Biscuits; days later the parties announced a split, with United Biscuits taking the UK business — for £240 million, according to English Wikipedia’s United Biscuits article — and Fruitfield Foods taking the Irish business. Fruitfield was renamed Jacob Fruitfield Food Group, and in August 2011 it was acquired by Valeo Foods, the Dublin food group formed in 2010; Valeo was itself bought by the investment firm Bain Capital in 2021, English Wikipedia says.

A third owner holds the name further east. Danone kept the Jacob’s brand in Asia, with a factory in Malaysia, until its biscuit division was acquired by Kraft Foods in 2007; Mondelēz International now makes and sells Jacob’s biscuits there, according to English Wikipedia.

The biscuit trade in Britain and Europe.

The seven brands in this group all bake biscuits, and they come from five countries: McVitie’s, Walker’s Shortbread and Tunnock’s from Scotland, Fox’s from England, Jacob’s from Ireland, Bahlsen from Germany and Lotus Biscoff from Belgium. Biscuit brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family-run bakeries that still work from the town where they began to names that have passed through several corporate owners, and a single packet on a supermarket shelf rarely says which of those it is.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried by a wrapper, a shape and a habit — the biscuit eaten with tea or coffee, at a desk, in a lunchbox or on a plane — more than by the factory behind it, because the name on the front may have changed hands, or changed countries, long after the recipe was settled. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its biscuits are actually baked.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its factories and its packaging — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, two businesses.

The result is one name run by two separate businesses. In the UK the brand belongs to pladis, the London-based snacking company that Turkey’s Yıldız Holding formed in January 2016, having bought United Biscuits in November 2014; United Biscuits’ UK operating company was renamed pladis (UK) Limited in November 2023, English Wikipedia says. The UK range is built around savoury lines such as Cream Crackers, Twiglets and Mini Cheddars, and the Aintree factory remains the main UK producer, according to English Wikipedia, which cites reports of more than 55,000 tonnes of products a year in 2015 and a £10 million investment by United Biscuits the same year. Production there has seen dispute: GMB members at Aintree struck for eleven weeks from November 2022, and in 2023 pladis announced job cuts that the GMB said would affect 361 of about 760 workers.

In Ireland the brand belongs to Valeo Foods, whose Dublin head office is the address given on the Irish Jacob’s website. That range leans sweet: the site’s own history page features Club Milk, Fig Rolls, a chocolate collection and the “Mallows” trio of Kimberley, Mikado and Coconut Cream. Jacob Fruitfield stopped baking at Tallaght in 2009, closing the plant after what English Wikipedia calls 156 years of making biscuits in Ireland, with 220 jobs lost.

Jacob’s advertising has long played on its own products. An Irish campaign asked “How to get the fig into the Fig Rolls,” and in the late 1980s and early 1990s the company used the slogan “Take the biscuit,” English Wikipedia says; the Irish website still asks how the figs get into the Fig Rolls today.

For a design guide, Jacob’s shows how one heritage name can be run by two owners on either side of the Irish Sea, with different ranges and the same founding date. Compare Verkade, the Dutch biscuit maker that also sits in the pladis portfolio, and Rowntree’s, another Quaker-founded firm. For this guide we use a cracker gold, a biscuit red and a flour cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jacob’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.