A range of preserves named after a television cook.

Mrs Bridges is a range of preserves, curds, chutneys, relishes, salsas and mustards made in Arbroath, on the Angus coast of Scotland, by Mackays Ltd, the jam and marmalade company that also sells jars under its own Mackays name. The brand’s website calls Mrs Bridges a “purveyor of fine preserves, curds, chutneys, relishes, salsas and mustards since 1967,” and says the Mrs Bridges “we know today” launched that year.

The name comes from television. Mrs Kate Bridges is the cook in Upstairs, Downstairs, the drama that London Weekend Television made for ITV and that ran for 68 episodes in five series from 1971 to 1975, English Wikipedia says. She was played by Angela Baddeley, and the series followed the Bellamy family and their servants at 165 Eaton Place in London; in the United States it was shown as part of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. The brand’s website makes the link itself, saying Mrs Bridges was “immortalised” in the long-running 1970s series, where she reigned “downstairs” alongside the butler, Mr Hudson.

The brand tells its own story through the character. Its “about” page, in a version archived by the Wayback Machine in 2015 and in the version online in 2026, gives Kate Bridges a life of her own: an under cook “in service” to families in the Victorian English countryside who collected recipes — “receipts,” as they were then called — and earned the honorary title of “Mrs” when she became cook to an Edwardian family. The 2015 version went further, placing her with Lady Marjorie and Richard Bellamy at Eaton Place, cooking for King Edward, and gathering her recipes into a book called Practical Household Cookery in 1905. Earlier versions of the site, archived in 2006 and 2009, were written in her voice. Her preserves, marmalades and curds, the site said, had been “much loved by those both ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ at Eaton Place,” and the recipes she had collected in service had been “lovingly recreated” for the range. The page signed off with a line that doubled as a slogan: “at Mrs Bridges we’re preserving tradition.”

A signature jar, a mop cap and a bow.

The pack is the part of the brand the company describes most directly. Its website says the Mrs Bridges jar has a “signature jar shape, exclusive to Mrs Bridges,” and that it is finished with a “traditional mop cap and bow,” which, the company says, adds “a touch of luxury to every product.” A mop cap is a loose, gathered cloth cap of the kind worn indoors by women and household servants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same wording about the jar, cap and bow appears in the 2015 archived version of the site, and a 2009 version of the homepage described a portfolio that “retains more than a touch of nostalgia — from the classic packaging to the traditional recipes and methods.”

The range has always been wider than jam. The brand says it offers more than 150 products, many of them combined into gift sets. The archived site of the mid-2000s sold preserves, marmalades and curds alongside chutneys, relishes, sauces and salsas, gift baskets and hampers, and a line of “old fashioned sweets” such as striped humbugs and bulls’ eyes. Today the website groups the range into marmalades, preserves, curds, condiments, chutneys, and relishes and salsas, with gifts and hampers sold separately; the 2015 version of the site called Mrs Bridges “the perfect choice for food gifting.”

Awards have been part of the pitch. A 2008 page on the brand’s website said Mrs Bridges had won 41 Great Taste Awards over a four-year period, with six golds that year, among them its Dundee Orange Marmalade and a chilli mustard; the page described the awards as judged by an independent panel that included chefs, buyers and critics. By 2015 the site put the total at more than 60 Great Taste Awards.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make jam, preserves or sweet spreads, and they come from France, Belgium, the United States, Britain and Italy: Christine Ferber, Lucien Georgelin, Materne, Sarabeth’s, Mrs Bridges, Thursday Cottage and Nutella. Jam and spread brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small kitchens that still carry a founder’s name 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 jam or spread brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a jar, a label and the breakfast table it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its kitchens or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its jars are actually filled.

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

A second brand inside an Angus jam maker.

Mrs Bridges belongs to Mackays. A 2005 version of the brand’s website said its online store was operated by Mackays Limited, then registered in Carnoustie, and directed trade enquiries to Mackays; it gave a Mrs Bridges address in Arbroath. In September 2017 Insider, the Scottish business magazine, listed “the heritage-oriented Mrs Bridges, which was relaunched earlier this year,” among the brands of Mackays, which it described as owned by the Grant family. In October 2018 The Courier, the Dundee daily, called Mackays the firm behind Dundee Marmalade and Mrs Bridges preserves, and reported that it had acquired a neighbouring industrial site in Arbroath for co-packing and logistics, freeing space at its main production base for a new food-service line.

Its ownership has followed that of Mackays. Mackays says the Mackay brothers started making jam in a former carrot factory in Carnoustie in 1938, that Paul Grant took on the business in 1995, and that it moved from Carnoustie to a larger site in Arbroath in 2008. In October 2023 a majority stake in Mackays was bought by Permian Industries, a Toronto holding company run by the Mitchell family, the Scottish business press reported, with Martin Grant staying on as managing director. In 2025 The Courier described Mackays as part of Mitchells Foods, a Permian business, and it has reported the company trading under both the Mackays and Mrs Bridges names, with exports to some 70 to 80 countries in different years.

For a design guide, Mrs Bridges shows how a borrowed character, a distinctive jar and a mop cap can make a whole range of preserves read as a gift. Compare Mackays, the Arbroath company’s own-name brand, and Hartley’s, another long-lived British jam name. For this guide we use a preserve red, a damson plum and a mop-cap cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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