Club Milk

Development in Great Britain

No one knows for sure when Club Milk biscuits first arrived in England, though they may have come over informally along the trade route from Ireland to the port of Liverpool. Jacob's already had a Liverpool factory by 1914, and soon started making Club Milk there. In 1970 the Irish and British halves of Jacob's split into separate companies. By then the Club biscuit was widely popular across Great Britain, sold in five varieties.

The original Club Milk, coated in milk chocolate, was joined by Club Plain, which used plain chocolate. For this new product the "Club" name was adapted: the wrapper showed a golf ball instead of the club suit from playing cards. Two flavoured versions, Club Orange and Club Mint, were made by adding flavour to the cocoa cream. Club Fruit put raisins into that same cream between the two biscuits.

A Club Honeycomb variety came later. In the 1990s there was a range called Jacob's Club Class, with three versions and a television advert called "Rhino Swan Lake". In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Jacob's released Club Cake bars. From the mid-1970s into the 1990s, Jacob's used the advertising slogan "If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our Club", set to music and used as a theme in TV campaigns. In 2012 a sample of British adults voted that jingle the seventh catchiest of all time.

Changes of ownership

In the mid-1990s, Groupe Danone, a French company, bought both the Irish and British Jacob's firms and changed the biscuit and its packaging. The original design, with two biscuits joined by cocoa cream, was swapped for a single biscuit topped with cocoa cream. The real chocolate coating was replaced with a thinner chocolate-like layer. The original milk and plain versions were stopped, and the flavored ones were put in cellophane flow packs.

In September 2004, Danone sold the Jacob's brand to United Biscuits, a British company. United Biscuits brought back some traditional features, like the two-layer packaging with an inner foil and outer paper wrapper, but kept the single-biscuit structure. The Irish part of the business went to Fruitfield Foods, creating the Jacob Fruitfield Food Group, which sparked legal fights over the Jacob's name. Starting in 2013, United Biscuits renamed the product McVities Club, using the Jacob's brand for savory biscuits and McVities for sweet ones.

Irish production resumed

After a trademark dispute between United Biscuits in the UK and Fruitfield in Ireland over the Jacob's brand went unresolved, the Irish company started making the Club Milk bar again. They went back to the classic design: two biscuits held together with cocoa cream and coated in thick milk chocolate. Plain and wafer versions have also been made, and all are sold in the Republic of Ireland. In its advertising for the Irish Club Milk, the company tells customers to "forget any poor imitations" before describing the biscuit's features as now produced in Ireland.

Over the years, there have been limited editions like Club Orange and Club Mint. A wafer version called Choc Wafer was sold for a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2019, a new version called Club Chunky came out. A 1970s TV ad featured a bishop and the jingle "Club Milk is Best After All."

From 1983 to 1994, a series of TV ads used the slogan "If you're going to have a cuppa, have a Club." In 1995, a similar song dropped the word "cuppa" and became "You to have a Club." The late 1990s saw the Andy Williams song "Music to Watch Girls By" used in ads. The last television advertisement, in 2006, was "Some kind of Wonder full," a version used for most of their biscuits.