Who invented jelly tots?

Answer 1

Brian Boffey: Horsforth's own Jelly Tots inventor

Jelly Tots inventor - Horsforth's Brian Boffey.

« Previous

« Previous

Next »

Next »

View Gallery

ADVERTISEMENT

Published Date: 09 March 2009 A chance discovery more than 40 years ago added up to a sweet success for one Horsforth man - even if hardly anyone knows about it. Grant Woodward reports.

When Brian Boffey tells a woman about his past he normally gets one of two very different reactions.

"They either hug me for keeping their children happy for however many minutes or give me a slap for ruining their teeth," he laughs.

* Click here to sign up to free news and sport email alerts from Horsforth Today.

* Click here for latest Horsforth news.

The reason for the contrasting emotions is that Brian has a novel claim to fame - one that has stayed something of a closely-guarded secret for nearly half-a-century.

And what's more, it came about completely by accident.

The 73-year-old was working as a young research scientist at Rowntrees at York when he invented popular children's sweet Jelly Tots.

At the time he was trying to come up with a way to produce a powdered jelly that set instantly when it was added to cold water.

* Click here to have your say on stories and issues in Horsforth.

"I was running an experiment which used very high speed Photography to see exactly how drops of hot Gelatin formed," he recalls.

"One morning, one of the marketing directors was walking through the lab when he noticed a tray of cold droplets that had landed in sugar.

"After I'd explained they were the waste from the experiment he asked me to colour and flavour a few and bring them to his office.

"The next morning Jelly Tots were born."

Jelly Tots were first launched in 1967 and the soft, chewy fruit sweets with a sugar-coating quickly became established as a popular children's line.

Despite them going on to become one of the most successful sweets of all time, Brian can't remember exactly when he made his discovery.

"I didn't even write it in my diary," he says. "I was about 28 at the time and so busy with all the other products I was working on that I didn't pay much attention to it."

Brian, who is married with three grown-up sons, later travelled to Chicago to work with NASA on their attempts to freeze dry food for the Apollo space missions.

He never did find a way of producing an instantly-setting powdered jelly, but he still remembers some of the stranger requests that came into Rowntrees.

"We used to send chocolates to India in cardboard boxes but the termites would get in and eat the lot so in the end we had to send them in tins with the lids soldered on.

"Every day I used to go in wondering what would be in the post. We once had a letter from central Africa complaining that our jellies wouldn't set.

"I discovered the writer lived in Zanzibar where it never got below 100 degrees centigrade. I wrote back suggesting they left their jellies in the fridge.

"There was also once a rumour doing the rounds that Kit-Kats could spontaneously ignite - but that was just concocted by the warehouse guys to cover up the fact they had been smoking in there."

Brian eventually left Rowntrees to go into teaching, ending up as the principal of Thomas Danby College in Leeds until his retirement in 1986.

But despite the success of his invention he has never sought

recognition and admits he is far more partial to a slab of chocolate.

And although some people might think he made millions from his idea, Brian insists he didn't pocket a penny.

"Rowntrees were very good to me and I certainly don't mind not having been recognised as the man who invented Jelly Tots," he says.

"I'm just delighted that something so successful came out of an experiment that was otherwise a failure."

contributed from: http://www.horsforthtoday.co.UK/news/Brian-Boffey-Horsforth39s-own-Jelly.5050819.jp