Unique and colorful vehicles used to promote Life Savers from its Hamilton facility
They helped calm that tickle in our throat when we sat in the movie house. They helped calm the fussy child two pews over during service. They were a welcome and traditional part of the Christmas season for both giving and receiving.
And chances are that for most of us, the Life Savers that have been a part of our lives were produced in Hamilton for more than 70 years in a facility tucked up under the escarpment on Cumberland Avenue.
In a city that has been known for its steel and heavy industry, the Life Savers plant offered a sweet-smelling respite from the smoke and fumes. The original building on Cumberland at the top of Sanford Avenue was the home to the F.F. Dalley Company, which produced a variety of shoe polishes and leather stains, including its popular “Spanish Blacking” and “Duchess Dressing” products.
In 1922, despite local protests, Hamilton city council voted in favor of allowing new industry at this location when Dalley moved out, and a year later the New York-based Beech-Nut Packing Company moved in to produce chewing gum, its sole Canadian plant. No candy with the hole. Yet. About 10 years previous, Clarence Crane, a Cleveland, Ohio candy maker, developed a line of hard candy mints. They were round in shape similar to a life preserver, and would not melt like chocolate in the summer heat. But Crane could not make a go with his new candy, and sold the rights and process to Edward Noble in 1913 who formed the Life Savers and Candy Company.
Noble used his marketing skills to advantage, and the company prospered. In 1920 a Canadian operation was started in Prescott,
Ontario to produce the popular candy with a hole, now available in six flavors.
But by the early 1930s, Hamilton became the sole Canadian manufacturer of Life Savers. A fire destroyed the Prescott plant, and in 1931 Life Savers acquired Beech-Nut, and focused its attention to making the candy with the hole.
During this decade, Live Savers continued with the original Pep-o-Mint, and the lemon, lime and orange flavors were supplemented with cherry and pineapple to produce the iconic Five Flavors Life Savers roll in 1935, a combination that was not altered for 70 years. Butter rum was also introduced, in 1938.
The Cumberland Avenue plant was prosperous and through the decades new flavors were introduced. The mint-based Life Savers and the fruit flavored Life Savers, also known as boiled candy, were produced with sugar and glucose as a base for both. With the mint candies, this base was dried to remove moisture, flavoring oils were added with some water, and this mixture was put into a hopper. This was fed into a machine with a revolving disc which created the Life Saver-sized hole in the mixture, and then a punch would stamp out the familiar shape.
Advertising its product had been an important part of Life Savers, starting with newspaper, magazine, and radio advertising.
Television, let alone the internet, was far in the future. But the company was tuned in with the times and promoted its product with some interesting rolling billboards.
While trucks were naturals for displaying a company’s wares on their painted sides, several companies took this one step farther, building vehicles which resembled the actual product. The most remembered examples of this are the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, and the Zippo lighter car. Life Savers was at the forefront of this trend with several fleets of mechanized marketing vehicles used by its sales staff.
Perhaps the most blatant mobile display was the fleet of 1933 Dodges with car bodies purpose-built to resemble 15-foot long rolls of Life Savers. Advertising at the time noted the “body” on the Dodge was 84,000 times the size of a regular pack of the candy with the hole.
These custom-made cars were powered by a six-cylinder engine, and featured optional wire wheels and rare whitewall tires to dress them up. It appears the car’s engine, frame, running gear, fenders, and bumpers are all that were used from the donor car. There is a good chance the chrome headlight pods were retained, fitted into the circular body at the front. The “hole” in the car’s front would have been open to allow air to the radiator and engine compartment. The cars sport just two seats, have a custom windshield, and no weather protection.
Five of these unique advertising vehicles gathered in the early 1930s for a portrait at Carter’s, a one-stop total car care facility on Main Street east just west of Wellington Street. Along with Firestone tires and Red Indian gasoline, a motorist could purchase a new Willard battery and get his brakes relined.
While this building is still in use, it no longer services automobiles. The Life Saver Dodges have long since disappeared, no longer traveling across the country to delight children and put bemused smiles on the faces of adults.
A little more subdued but still effective promotion was a fleet of 1937 Ford sedan delivery vehicles with oversize Life Saver rolls on their roofs and body graphics depicting a colorful cascade of falling Life Savers.
No whitewalls or open-air motoring like the Dodges, these little trucks were meant to deliver the goods. A cross between a car and a panel truck, Ford, along with other car makers of the time, produced these vehicles, which featured an all-steel body on a passenger car platform. Sedan deliveries were common in cities, used by retail stores for delivering goods, and the Life Savers Fords would have delivered the little candies throughout the Hamilton area.
Ford produced over 921,000 vehicles in 1937, but its Sedan Delivery was a fairly rare duck, with only 7,950 produced. The majority of these were standard versions with very few frills and creature comforts. In 1937 Ford introduced its 60-horsepower V8 engine as a little brother to its 85-horsepower V8, known to car fans as the Flathead, due to the engine’s valve and cylinder head configuration. Hopefully the Life Savers trucks were not equipped with the smaller engines, as they were just too small for the heavier vehicle. The 60 engines were just the ticket for Midget car racing, a very popular class of racer at this time.
The Sedan Deliveries pictured here with the model sitting on the second vehicle with her own personal promotional Life Savers roll are on the front lawn of the Cumberland Avenue plant. The trucks must be quite new, as enlarging the photo shows 1937 Ontario license plates on the front bumpers, and the plates are sequentially numbered. The 1937-issued plates were unique for that year as they sported two crowns to celebrate the coronation of George VI.
In 1950 the company announced it would be building a new facility to replace the former Dalley plant. Cooper Construction built the modern $600,000, two-storey building which opened in 1951 with 45,000 feet of space, close to double the area of the older building.
By 1969 the Hamilton plant was producing over a billion individual Life Savers in 26 flavors. Five years later the company introduced its lollipop with a hole in the center and some new gum. By 1979 Life Savers employed 100 and produced 30 million rolls of candy which were distributed to 600,000 stores across Canada.
In 1981 The company was purchased by Nabisco Brands, which sold it to Hershey Canada in 1987. In 1996 Beta Brands took over the Canadian facility with the intention of moving production to London but kept the plant in Hamilton until 2003.
But after Kraft bought the rights to Life Savers in 2002, it eventually moved all Canadian and US Life Savers production to Montreal which closed the Hamilton plant permanently soon after. Life Savers are now produced by chewing gum giant Wrigley.
Now over 100 years old, Life Savers are still a big seller in the candy world, and one of the most recognized. They just aren’t made in Hamilton any more, nor are there unique promotional vehicles displaying the popular confection. The 1951 factory was demolished, but as a legacy to the Life Savers name and the people that produced them, the property at the corner of Cumberland and Sanford is named Life Savers Park.