Long before anyone said "meme," a Bristol chocolate maker put the same boy's face on a wrapper five times, each one showing a slightly different emotion, and turned it into one of the most recognisable adverts in British history.
Bristol's chocolate pioneer
J.S. Fry & Sons was one of the oldest chocolate businesses in the world, tracing back to 18th-century Bristol, and racked up several genuine industry firsts long before the Five Boys campaign: the first mass-market solid moulded chocolate bar in Britain in 1847, and the first chocolate Easter egg sold in the UK, in 1873.
The wrapper that became the whole advert
Launched in 1902, Fry's Five Boys Milk Chocolate used a wrapper built around five sequential photographs of one boy's face, each captioned with an emotion: Desperation, Pacification, Expectation, Acclamation, Realization. It was, in effect, sequential visual storytelling in advertising decades before that became a standard technique — a single wrapper doing the work of a whole comic strip.
From Fry's to Cadbury
Fry's merged with Cadbury in 1919 to form the British Cocoa and Chocolate Company. Several Fry's products survived for decades under Cadbury ownership — Fry's Turkish Delight and Fry's Chocolate Cream are still made today — but Five Boys itself was eventually discontinued, generally dated to the 1970s, as Cadbury streamlined overlapping ranges.
Why the image still surfaces today
Design and advertising history courses still hold the Five Boys wrapper up as one of the earliest examples of a sequential, emotion-led ad campaign, and it resurfaces online periodically for exactly that reason — it looks and behaves like a proto-meme format that happens to predate the internet by about a century. If it's put you in the mood for something with real history behind it, our chocolate and retro sweets collections are a good place to start.
Frequently asked questions
What was Fry's Five Boys chocolate bar?
A 1902 milk chocolate bar from J.S. Fry & Sons, Bristol, with a wrapper showing one boy's face across five emotions: Desperation, Pacification, Expectation, Acclamation, Realization.
Is it still made?
No — Cadbury discontinued it in the 1970s after absorbing Fry's, though the wrapper remains a well-known piece of advertising history.
What other firsts is Fry's known for?
The first mass-market solid chocolate bar in Britain (1847) and the first UK chocolate Easter egg (1873).