PRODUCT ARCHIVE

Health Biscuits (vintage)

Mrs Bollock's vintage health biscuit tin
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PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Victorian Nourishment, Now with More Bollocks

A convincingly antiquated health-biscuit tin, all florals, medallions and earnest Victorian nutrition, until the decorative details reveal a rather more testicular line of thought.

Mrs Bollock’s Biscuits keeps the restrained typography, botanical ornament and pseudo-scientific seriousness of Mellin’s original, then quietly replaces the wholesome symbolism with scrotums, anatomical Latin and other entirely unsuitable refinements.

PUBLIC RESPONSE

Customer Reviews

★★★★★

“Looks genuinely antique until you read the small print. The tin is beautifully made and the joke gets worse the longer you inspect it.”

Gordon Sack, Harrogate

★★★★☆

“Very convincing vintage packaging. Lost one star because explaining ‘Testicles to mouth’ to my mother took longer than expected.”

Mavis Knackerby, York

★★★★★

“The sort of biscuit tin you could leave on a shelf for weeks before somebody finally notices the flowers are bollocks.”

Clive Testicombe, Leeds

BEHIND THE LABEL

Product Breakdown

ARCHIVE ENTRY

What

Antique Tin Box design for health biscuits.

When

July 2026

Origin Notes

There was no physical original but I found some good quality images on eBay for reference.

Original vs Rude Pantry Version

Original ProductRude Pantry Product
Parent Company Mellin’s Rude Pantry
Brand Mellin’s Mrs Bollock’s
Product Name Biscuits Biscuits
Variety n/a n/a
Dominant Theme Flowers and Graphical elements Testicles
Barcode Numbers Spell n/a n/a
Barcode Scans As n/a n/a

Comparison

The tin on the left was done by photoshopping the original design onto a photo of the new “tin”, as I have no physical original.

Full Designs

Development & Detail

Select any image to inspect the full-size source.

The trademark medallion was originally a bird feeding its chicks in a nest with Latin for “Pray & Work”. I changed it to Latin for “Testicles to mouth”. Of course.
There were lots of yellow flowers on the original, but I changed them to isolated scrotums.
As no original tin existed, I created and 3D printed a tin and lid, and sprayed it silver before applying the printed labels.

Notes

This was my first foray into vintage/antique packaging and labelling. Apparently, the Mellin’s Tin is probably from some time between 1900 and 1910, so I’m arbitrarily pegging it at around 1905.

The products name has had a bit of a deviation from the usual style and I just changed the name to something that neither looked nor sounded similar to the original. But it was still supposedly a founder’s name.
This one was more complex than I expected. And I added a bunch of SVG (vector-based) dust and debris to the surface of the designs. I could have more effectively done that in photoshop, but apart from the flowery/knackers bits, it’s all vector based.
This is also the first packaging I’ve done where I had no original physical product. Plus there was nothing to put the new design next to in a supermarket of course.

Marketed as a nourishing, easily digested biscuit for children, convalescents and those with delicate digestion, Mellin’s Health Biscuits combined malted grain extracts with Victorian ideas of scientific nutrition. Although genuinely mild and sustaining, their “health” claims were more modest than the advertising often suggested. Not that it even mentions much about the supposed health aspects on the original packaging.