A City grocer, a viceroy’s kitchen and a mango chutney.

Sharwood’s dates itself to 1889, the year its founder, James Allen Sharwood, introduced Green Label Mango Chutney to Britain. Premier Foods, which owns the brand today, says on its corporate history page that Sharwood brought chutneys and spice powders into the UK; its American brand site adds that Green Label arrived alongside curry powders, pickles and other chutneys, and describes the founder as an avid traveller who spoke four languages. A history of the firm published in 2017 by the British antiques site Let’s Look Again says Sharwood, born in Islington in 1859, had set up as a wholesale grocer on Carter Lane, in the City of London, in 1888.

The same history tells the brand’s best-known origin story. A family friend, it says, introduced Sharwood to Lord Dufferin, Viceroy of India from 1884 to 1888, who asked him to source supplies from Europe for his French chef. The trade soon ran the other way too. In 1893, the company says, Sharwood brought to Britain the curry powder of Vencatachellum, a supplier in Madras; by 1902 J A Sharwood was supplying foodstuffs to Cunard’s ocean liners, and in 1933 it advertised itself as the largest dealer in Indian condiments in the world.

The business became a limited company in 1899 and, from 1900, had its own factory, the Offley Works in Vauxhall, south London, according to Let’s Look Again. James Allen Sharwood retired in 1927, the company says. The chutney most associated with the brand abroad is sold in North America as Major Grey mango chutney, a sweet style named after a nineteenth-century British army officer who, English Wikipedia notes, was probably apocryphal; the same article says the Major Grey version is no longer mass-produced for sale in the UK.

From Cerebos and RHM to Premier Foods.

Sharwood’s stopped being an independent firm in 1962, when the salt and food group Cerebos bought J A Sharwood & Co, a maker of chutneys and curry sauces, according to the industrial-history reference Grace’s Guide. Around 1964 Cerebos grouped it with other food businesses in a subsidiary called Brand-Sharwood, and production moved from Vauxhall to the Cerebos factory at Greatham, near Hartlepool. In 1968 Cerebos itself was taken over by Rank Hovis McDougall (RHM) in an agreed deal, bringing Sharwood’s into a group that also owned Bisto, Paxo and Saxa salt, Grace’s Guide says.

Under RHM the brand grew from chutney into cooking sauces. The company says that in 1980 Sharwood’s was the first to bring a tikka masala sauce to Britain, along with poppadoms to cook at home and naan breads; that it had held a royal warrant to supply chutney to Queen Elizabeth II in 1975; and that by 1998 it held a third of the UK market for Oriental foods. Its range now spans Indian, Chinese and Thai cooking: cooking sauces and curry kits, pastes, chutneys and pickles, poppadoms, naans, noodles and prawn crackers, its UK website shows.

Premier Foods completed its £1.2 billion takeover of RHM on 16 March 2007, and Sharwood’s joined Premier alongside Mr Kipling, Bisto, Paxo and McDougalls flour, Premier says. That July Premier announced it would close six factories, among them the Wythenshawe plant in Manchester that made Sharwood’s poppadoms, Food Manufacture reported. Sharwood’s sauces are now made at Premier’s factory in Worksop, Nottinghamshire. In November 2025 Premier announced a £36 million investment there to more than double capacity for its cooking-sauce brands, which it named as Sharwood’s, Homepride and Loyd Grossman, Food Manufacture and The Grocer reported; the site employs about 500 people.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make sauces, pestos, soups or cooking sauces, and they come from Italy, Britain and Hong Kong: Sacla’, Bertolli, Sharwood’s, Amoy, Baxters, Daddies and Dolmio. Sauce and soup 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 corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A sauce brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a jar, a bottle, a name and the meal 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 sauces are actually cooked 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 products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A British owner, a Japanese partner and a brushstroke pack.

Sharwood’s has stayed with Premier Foods. Its UK and American websites both carry Premier Foods copyright notices in 2026, and Premier’s 2024–25 results name it among the brands leading the group’s international growth, with gains in France and Germany alongside sales in Australia, New Zealand and North America. Premier’s partnership with Japan’s Nissin Foods, which agreed in 2016 to buy 17.27% of Premier from Warburg Pincus, The Grocer reported, produced Sharwood’s Noodle & Sauce Pots in 2018.

The brand has used famous names sparingly. In August 2010 the actor Joanna Lumley helped create a limited-edition Mango Chutney with Kashmiri chilli, an ingredient from her birthplace, with Sharwood’s donating 10p from each jar to the Gurkha Welfare Trust, BBC News reported. In 2021 Sharwood’s returned to television advertising under the line “Adventures in flavour since 1889,” Premier Foods says.

The current look dates from 2016. In November that year Premier unveiled new packaging by the branding consultancy Coley Porter Bell, Packaging News reported: free brushstrokes in vivid colours, product names written in free-form lettering, and separate palettes and symbols for the Indian, Chinese and Thai ranges. Coley Porter Bell’s executive creative director, James Ramsden, told the magazine that cooking sauces had become a far more commoditised category and that Sharwood’s needed to give shoppers more of an experience.

For a design guide, Sharwood’s shows how a Victorian grocer’s mango chutney can carry one name across a whole aisle of Asian cooking. Compare Amoy, the other long-standing name in British Asian cooking sauces, and Kikkoman, the Japanese soy sauce maker. For this guide we use a chutney amber, a saffron red and a leaf green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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