Trebor (confectionery)

Trebor is a British brand of confectionery, and a former British company.

It was founded on 4 January 1907 in south-west Essex by Sydney Herbert Marks from Leytonstone, sited on Katherine Road in Forest Gate. The Trebor name was registered as a trademark four days after the end of WW1.

On 18 April 1944 the Katherine Road factory was hit by a German bomb.

It bought Moffat toffee in 1959. Jamesons Chocolates was bought in 1960.

By the late 1960s it was exporting to over fifty countries; 20% of its output from its three factories was exported. The USA was its largest export market. Up to 1966, it had doubled its exports in four years. In the 1967 Birthday Honours, the Chairman John Marks (son of the founder, and who died in December 1980) was awarded the CBE for the company's exports; he was President from 1956-59 of the Cocoa, Chocolate and Confectionery Alliance. By the late 1960s, it was the fourth-largest confectionery manufacturing group in the UK; its main competitors were Rowntree Mackintosh Confectionery and Cadbury.

In January 1969, it bought the confectionery interests of Clarnico. In 1970, John Graham Marks (29 September 1930 - 31 October 2012), the grandson of the company's founder, became Chairman of the company, and owned the company with his brother Ian; the company was family-run and also had a Christian paternalistic ethos. In 1981 the company discontinued night-shifts as it believed that night-shifts were possibly damaging to family life.

In December 1985 it bought Maynards for £7.5m. In the mid-1980s, the company was the British market leader in branded mints and boiled sweets.

On Thursday 14 September 1989, Cadbury Schweppes bought the company for £147m. The company was run as a subsidiary company of Cadbury. At the time, the company employed around 3,000.

From 1 March 1990, the company was known as Trebor Bassett, a division of Cadbury. Production would eventually move to north Sheffield, off the A61.

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