William Santus: A story of handmade sweets

Meet John Winnard MBE, who co-runs the family sweet company William Santus, maker of the famous Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls. Read about the history of the company of the way in which the sweets are manufactured.

It was founded by my great great uncle. He was friendly with a family called the Atty family who made sweets in the late 1800s and Mr Santus had a fruit stall and his wife started making sweets in her back kitchen and selling them on the corner of his stall. So, in 1898 we say that’s when the company started when they made the first Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls. My grandpa was the nephew of William Santus, so it went to my grandpa, then my Dad and my brother and myself run the company now.

I think as time’s gone on, I think we’ve become more unique because a large company wouldn’t produce sweets in the way that we produce sweets and it’s probably just from the heritage point of view. We use cream of tartar rather than glucose and for that reason our products, certainly on the Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, which is our main product, our flagship product, are suitable for vegans and vegetarians, so we’re getting some market that we really didn’t set out to go into, but that’s where we see it developing. 

We did at one time sell about 57 varieties, which is a bit like Heinz, but we found the old 80-20 syndrome where 80% of your sales from 20% of your products, so we narrowed the field down. And what we tend to do now is look at different trends, so we’d still do pear drops, winter nips, cough candy and things like that, but we’re certainly doing I suppose new ventures for us like we’re doing gin and wild berry, gin and rhubarb and ginger flavoured sweets, so we’re getting more in the kind of gift market. 

We hand make our sweets. We still do it very similar to what we did in 1898. We boil on open gas fires and then pour them onto steel tables which we’ve had since the factory was built, which was 1921. The factory was started in 1919 and finished in 1921. I say that very quickly because HRH The Prince of Wales came to celebrate our hundred years in the factory last year. 

So, we pour it onto steel tables and then it’s really probably from the forming time that we then move into high-speed machines, so we’ll use the high-speed wrapping machine, which we bought from Italy a couple of years ago, and that’s like a £100,000 machine that’ll wrap up to 2,000 sweets in a minute. My friend was in the army and he said that they used to fire the rounds of ammunition, the tracer bullets, at around 750 rounds a minute, so we’re wrapping sweets quicker than he was firing tracer bullets.

Most of our staff are from Wigan, we are lucky to have great and loyal staff. We are based right in the middle of the town centre, which has its good points and bad points. One thing people can get to us very easily. We’re based about 100 yards from the railway station and 50 yards from the bus station, so transportation for our staff is very easy and people visiting, but then we have the confines of getting juggernauts or big wagons coming to the factory through the town centre which is not ideal. 

It’s a difficult question to answer when I’m 64 nearly, but the company's like my baby so I’m going to work as long as I can. I still look at long-term goals. The long-term might not be as long as when I was in my thirties and forties, but I’m still looking up to 20 years and hopefully my health will last that long. So, I’m doing the trade shows, developing sales further afield is something I want to do. When my brother and myself took over from our father, then we were only working within a 50-mile radius of Wigan and now we’re in Australia, New Zealand, we’re in Japan, the US.

We’ve got a close relationship with Wigan and Leigh Hospice, because a lot of our staff in the past have been involved in the hospice. I give talks about the company, the history of the company, how we started, mainly to townswomen’s guilds and women’s institutes and groups like that, and I always do it in aid of Wigan and Leigh Hospice. 

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