Two brothers, a carrot factory and the berry fields of Angus.

Mackays is a jam and marmalade maker in Arbroath, on the Angus coast north-east of Dundee, and the brand writes its name as one word, without an apostrophe. Its story, as the company tells it, begins in 1938 in the neighbouring town of Carnoustie, where the Mackay brothers took over a building that had been used for processing carrots and turned it into a jam factory, buying berries from the farms around it. Its history page presents Carnoustie as the brand’s birthplace and Arbroath, a short way up the coast, as its home since 2008.

The brothers sold in 1970. The company says the buyer was United Biscuits, the British biscuit group behind McVitie’s, which turned the Carnoustie factory into the supplier of the jam for the middle of its Jam Ring biscuits. In that period, it says, the factory gained a specialist in marmalade: Les Nicholson, who had worked at Keiller of Dundee, and who brought that marmalade know-how with him.

Grant’s of Dundee, then Mackays again.

The brand was revived by a United Biscuits employee. The company says Paul Grant, who had joined United Biscuits at nineteen, set out in 1995 to build a Scottish marmalade and jam brand from the factory, seeing value both in the local fruit and in Dundee’s marmalade heritage. It dates the first jar shipped to Canada to 1996, and the first listing in Tesco stores in Scotland to 1997, when the jars were sold as Grant’s of Dundee. In 2000, the company says, the branding went back to the factory’s original name, Mackays, to keep its heritage.

The business outgrew Carnoustie. In 2008, the company says, it moved from a 15,000 sq ft building with six pans to an 80,000 sq ft site in Arbroath with 22, and Princess Anne opened the new premises. It describes its method as small batches cooked in copper pans. One of its marmalades is sold as The Dundee Orange Marmalade, and The Courier, the Dundee daily, has described Mackays as the only remaining producer of Dundee orange marmalade in the Dundee area.

Martin Grant became managing director in 2011, according to the company, which says sales grew from £8.5 million to £17 million under him. In 2019 the company described Mackays as the third-largest preserve brand in the UK market, a claim it makes for itself. It adds that in 2021 it invested in new manufacturing and packaging equipment for the foodservice sector.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make jam or marmalade, and all of them come from Britain: Tiptree, Mackays, Hartley’s, Robertson’s, Duerr’s, Frank Cooper’s and Chivers. British jam and marmalade brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf.

A preserves brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a jar, a label and the breakfast table it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its jam and marmalade are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its preserves are made and how its jars and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Grant family to a Toronto holding company.

The Grant family owned the business for more than 25 years. In October 2023 a majority stake was bought by Permian Industries, a Toronto holding company run by the Mitchell family, the Scottish business press reported; the size of the stake was not disclosed. Daily Business reported on 10 October 2023 that the Mitchells run eight businesses in food processing and distribution, agriculture, packaging and technology across Canada, the United States and Mexico, that Martin Grant would stay on as managing director, and that the Arbroath company employed more than 100 people, with sales of £18.7 million in the year to December 2022. Coverage of the deal listed the company’s range as marmalades, preserves, curds and chutneys. Martin Grant was quoted as saying the new owners understood the business, its manufacturing and the heritage of its products.

Later coverage named the owner more specifically. In 2025 The Courier described Mackays as part of Mitchells Foods, a Permian group business headquartered in Toronto, and reported that the company had halved its losses and grown sales by almost 20 per cent in its first full year under Canadian ownership, and that the new owners had opened up markets across the Atlantic. The link to North America is not new: the company dates its first export jar, sent to Canada, to 1996, a year after Paul Grant started the brand. Besides Mackays, the company trades under a second brand, Mrs Bridges, and The Courier has reported exports to some 70 to 80 countries in different years.

Mackays does not publish a design history of its labels, and we have found no documented account of who drew its jar labels or its logo, so we do not describe them here. What the record does document is a name that has moved: from a family surname, to a supplier inside a biscuit group, to Grant’s of Dundee, and back to Mackays.

For a design guide, Mackays shows how a regional story, Angus fruit and Dundee marmalade, can carry a brand that left its first town and its first owners behind. Compare Nairn’s, the Scottish oatcake maker, and Tunnock’s, the Uddingston family bakery. For this guide we use a deep navy, a Seville orange and a marmalade cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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