Health Biscuits – Steven Lovell

Health Biscuits (vintage)

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 Product	Rude 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.

Development & Detail

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.