The word "treacle" has meant an antidote to snake venom for far longer than it's meant anything you'd put on porridge. It comes from the Greek thēriakē — "concerning venomous beasts" — by way of Latin and Old French, and for centuries an apothecary's treacle was a medicine against poison, not a syrup for your toast. Which makes it a strange word to find, a few hundred years later, printed under a picture of a dead lion.
A byproduct sold from a barrel
In 1881, the Scottish businessman Abram Lyle built a sugar refinery on the Thames in East London and set to work with his five sons turning sugar cane into loaves. Refining sugar leaves behind a thick, dark syrup, and rather than waste it, Lyle filtered it through charcoal and started handing it out to his own workforce in barrels. His workers nicknamed it "Goldy." Demand outgrew the factory floor quickly enough that by 1883 it was being sold commercially — a byproduct with no real plan behind it, turned into a product because people kept asking for more.
A Bible riddle on a food label
Lyle was a serious, religious man, and when it came to naming and branding the syrup, he reached for scripture rather than a slogan. In the Book of Judges, Samson kills a lion, later finds a swarm of bees has nested in its carcass, and poses a riddle to his companions: "out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." Lyle put that image — a dead lion, swarming with bees — directly onto the tin, with the second half of the verse printed beneath it. It's an odd thing to find on a food label by any standard, and it's stranger still that it worked: that same lion has been quietly present on British kitchen shelves for over 140 years.
The tin that refused to change
The green-and-gold tin arrived in the 1880s and then, by design, mostly stopped being designed. Aside from weights shifting from pounds to grams for EU compliance, and cardboard briefly standing in for tin during both World Wars when metal was needed elsewhere, the packaging stayed as it was. In 2006, Guinness World Records recognised it as the world's oldest unchanged brand packaging — a record that held until February 2024, when Tate & Lyle gave the logo its first real redesign: a simplified lion's head, a single bee, and the Bible verse dropped entirely, rolled out on the newer squeeze bottles and portion packs while the classic tin kept its original artwork. It made news precisely because everyone had assumed that lion wasn't the kind of thing you touched.
Two tins, one trademark
Golden syrup and black treacle come from the same refining process, at different stages — golden syrup is the paler, earlier extraction, while black treacle is darker, stronger and closer to molasses, held back a stage further along. Both were sold under the same lion trademark, which is worth remembering next time either tin turns up in a recipe for treacle tart or a Christmas pudding: it's not two brands that happen to look alike, it's one Victorian design decision doing two jobs at once.
Out of the strong
Every time we draw that tin, we end up thinking about the riddle more than the syrup. Samson's companions only got the answer by leaning on his wife for it, and we'd bet most people who've had a tin in the cupboard for years couldn't tell you what the lion's doing there either. That's half the charm. Our Life is Sweet card draws the golden syrup tin just as it's always looked, and You Alright, Treacle? does the same for the black treacle, lion and bees included. Whether you explain the riddle to whoever gets one is up to you.
