Nestlé UK Archives

Thanks to the dedicated work of generations of archivists, Nestlé UK has built up a large and unusual business archive. We have everything from a 1920s advertising robot, to black and white film footage of Spike Milligan singing limericks.

Work at the Nestlé UK Archive: At a secret location 

It’s a fascinating collection, but it all has to be kept somewhere. The main collection is held in our purpose-built archive at our York factory, where works of art and 100 year old chocolates are preserved in climate and humidity controlled conditions.

Our Rowntree’s film archive, which amounts to around a hundred hours’ worth of footage, is  preserved and promoted by our friends at the Yorkshire Film Archive who have made some of the films available to view on  their website.

If you have any queries about the Rowntree film collection please contact the Yorkshire Film Archive, whose contact details can be found on their website.

Thanks to the hard work of the team at the Borthwick Institute Archives at York University Library, a huge collection of records and photographs from Rowntree’s of York, Mackintosh’s of Halifax, and many other subsidiary companies are available to view by appointment. 

If you have any queries about the company records in the Borthwick collection please contact the Borthwick Institute Archive, whose contact details can be found on their website.

Mackintosh’s and Rowntree’s packaging collections are held by the Bankfield and York Castle Museums respectively, but the museums are not able to offer a research service, or make the collections available to the public. Keep an eye on their websites for news of special exhibitions.

Since the sale of Crosse & Blackwell in 2002, all of our Crosse & Blackwell material has been sent to the prestigious London Metropolitan Archives. If you have any queries about this collection please contact the London Metropolitan Archives, whose contact details can be found on the City of London website.

The main Nestlé archive is kept at the archives of Nestlé headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland. The archive is not open to the public, but some of the materials are on display in local museums. Check with the Alimentarium for details of what’s currently on display.

The rest of our collection is kept here at our York factory archive, and I hope to be able to share more of it with you through these pages. We don’t offer tours or run a museum, but we do support the work of York’s Chocolate Story, who have a great visitor attraction that you can find out more about at their website.

You’re welcome to ask questions about the collection by filling in this web form, but at this stage we are unable to answer every query or make records available on request. However, we will try to work as many queries as possible into our programme of publication on the blog. Please note that we cannot date, value or purchase any items, although we do welcome donations of material to the collection.