We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how brand names like Haribo and Marmite sneakily refer to their origins.
Branding can have far more Easter eggs than I previously realised, it seems.
So I started to wonder what the “TUC” initials on those yellow-packaged crackers mean ― and was pretty surprised by the results I found, which had absolutely nothing to do with the product.
What does TUC stand for?
According to Mondelēz International, who now owns the brand, it was chosen by the inventor of the food after browsing a newspaper.
TUC biscuits were created in 1958 by confectionary company owner Mr Parein, who had travelled to the States to learn about crackers.
When he came back to his home country of Belgium, he’d started to think about what he would call his own brand of the salty snacks.
“It’s said he decided to use the initials T.U.C. after seeing the name “Trade Union Corporation” in a newspaper,” Mondelēz International’s site reads.
TUCs were then sold by Parien’s business to the French biscuit company LU.
LU offered benefits like free medical care and an emergency illness fund at the turn of the 20th century, Google Arts & Culture shared.
But at that time, “unions were banned. One attempt to unionise saw some 60 factory workers sacked,” they add.
When were crackers invented?
The thin, salty biscuits we know as crackers were first recorded in America in 1739, the Wall Street Journal writes.
But they add that Ancient Roman soldiers carried a hard biscuit called bucellatum with them on their travels because it could survive harsh conditions.
People in the ancient Middle East baked small, hard flatbreads to bring as lightweight food when travelling, too.
“Hardtack,” a tough-to-chew flour and water-based food often associated with military or naval operations, may also have been a predecessor.
However long they’ve been around, it took until 1898 for a company ingeniously named Uneeda Biscuit to realise that packing them in boxes, rather than stacking them in a barrel, was a more hygienic practice.