The firm was founded by John Mackintosh (1868–1920)[1] and his wife, Violet (née Taylor), who bought a pastry shop in Halifax with their joint savings of £100 in 1890, the year that they married.

The firm was converted into a limited liability company, John Mackintosh Ltd, in 1899 raising £11,000 and borrowing a further £4,000 to build a new works at Queen's Road.

When the building was destroyed by fire in 1909, the insurance payout was used to purchase the vacant Albion Mills and the Queen's Road factory was rebuilt and 1912 expanded to begin chocolate manufacture.

He began with handbills advertising Mackintosh's Celebrated Toffee as a weekend treat targeting the Saturday afternoon market, when workers had a half-holiday and their weekly wage payment in hand.

By paying the shareholders of the old company ordinary and preference shares in a sum greater than the issued capital of John Mackintosh Ltd., together with a substantial distribution, they[who?]

[3] The family ownership was supplemented by some key management appointments: Harold Mackintosh, chairman and managing director, took charge of purchasing; (John) Harry Guy, a Quaker and a Price Waterhouse trained accountant, became finance director (from 1922 until his death in 1955); Frank Bottomley, an old school friend of Harold, became works manager (retiring from the firm in 1966); and marketing was overseen by E. L. Fletcher, who joined the firm from the advertising agency T. B. Browne, where he had worked on the Mackintosh account.

[3] A series of surreal Heath Robinson cartoons of "Toffee Town" began a memorable national newspaper marketing campaign in October 1921.

The business was purchased in 1918 by the African and Eastern Trading Company and underwent expansion at Norwich and mineral water and cider factories in London, Ipswich, and Banham.

[citation needed] The lyrics of George Harrison's song "Savoy Truffle", first recorded by the Beatles on their self-titled album is a fanciful listing of flavours, some real and others imagined,[6] in a box of Mackintosh's Good News Chocolates.