About

What the…?

Well, we make award winning toffee and caramel based vegan confectionery – like no other!

If you’re looking for vegan, dairy-free creamy, chewy, yumminess, you’ve come to the right place! Nobody does chewy toffee and caramel treats quite like us. The key to our goodies tasting as good as they do, is our secret recipe, and our refusal to compromise!

We use traditional methods, cooking in our copper toffee cauldron. We haven’t tried to re-invent the wheel, we’ve just used some alternatives to the dairy used in ‘traditional’ toffee and caramels (and that’s the secret bit!).

So if you’re frustrated by all those ‘vegan alternatives to…’ that really don’t cut it from the supermarkets, you know, the things that, well, ‘vegans will like it’ (we won’t!), then you’re in for a real treat with our goodies!

We’re a small, vegan family run business, and back in 2015 we had the idea of creating the kind of chewy toffees and chocolates we used to love as kids. Sweets like ‘Toffos’ and chewy chocolates like ‘Rolos’ and ‘Toffee Crisps’! Things our vegan son had never experienced (and wondered why we talked about such things so much!), but what started out as a little ‘home project’ quickly grew!

So what’s our story?

We started from our home kitchen in Brighton, we’re now based in Port Glasgow, just outside Glasgow (we moved up from Brighton in early 2025). We’re a husband and wife team (and occasionally rope in our son too!), and our toffee based treats are at least as good as the dairy based sweets that we used to love.

IT ALL STARTED IN 2015…

…We’ve been vegan since the ’90s, and after being at a Viva! vegan festival in Brighton, where some bland gummies were the hot new sweet treat on the market, we both found ourselves talking about missing toffees, sweets like Rolos and Toffos, and our son, had no idea what we were talking about! That got me, Corin, thinking of how I used to make sweets as a teenager from my mum’s recipe books, and I’d love to make vegan versions for the family to enjoy.  I wanted that same flavour and soft chewy texture, not an easy thing to ‘veganise’, and so the quest for the perfect recipe began!

After a lot of trial and error, I developed a recipe that worked. Later that summer, while nibbling on a chunk of my latest test batch of toffee that I’d covered in a vegan alternative to milk chocolate, Lesley smiled at me and said: “You should sell these, people will love them!” And so the seed was planted.  I was working in London all the time as a photographer, and in need of a change, a big change, and toffee was going to be it!

Soft, chewy, vegan toffee!

“Oh my god, it’s like a Rolo!” was the response from friends and family who tried and loved the soft chewy toffees I was covering in chocolate. No one could believe that they were dairy-free…

“If we didn’t know you and trust you, we wouldn’t believe that these were vegan!”

By the end of 2015, after hundreds of experimental batches and studying up on the science of sugar confectionery, with help and support from some scientific minds, I finally had the ingredients and the method perfected, and had a toffee that was every bit as good as our childhood memories!

We had a good ‘proper’ toffee, and a softer chewier toffee/caramel chocolate too, but what to call it? We knew the name had to relate to love, but we were struggling to think of the perfect word. Then one night while talking about our darling cat Amelie, and how “she’s always good for a smooch!” (she is, she really is!), and that was it – ‘Smooch!’, but with an alternative spelling that gives the ‘ch’ more smack, ‘Smootch‘!

Our son had the idea of putting peanuts in, and that was a taste sensation! After initially calling these treats ‘Nuttees’, because Lesley’s mum would always ask for “a nutty one’, Lesley changed the name to ‘Rabble’, a reference to one of her favourite films, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, from when Malificent arrives uninvited to the celebrations of the arrival of the baby princess, she remarks: “…Well, quite a glittering assemblage King Stefan. Royalty, nobility, the gentry, and how quaint, even the rabble!” (referring to the three fairies). Our ‘range’ was starting to grow!

In February 2016 we launched ‘Jeavons Toffee’ at the Brighton VegFest, at the Brighton Centre. Our old friend Tim had been doing these events for many years, and to have one a few minutes down the road from our home in Brighton was the perfect place to unveil what we’d created. There were a lot of suspicious looks at our stall, containing our many flavoured toffees, our ‘Nuttees’ and ‘Smootches’, suspicious because vegan toffees aren’t going to be any good, right?! But those that tried a sample, quickly got it, with lots of goosebumps, lots of comments about how we’d taken folk back to their childhoods. But the best comment we overheard was someone saying to their friend “There’s nothing special about that, it’s just like normal toffee.” The highest praise we could hope to get! Ha!

Growing bigger!

By 2019 we were growing from strength to strength, outgrowing our tiny home kitchen, and moved into our own premises in Newhaven, just east of Brighton, the world’s first vegan toffee factory!  With funding and lots of support, we were able to buy some essential equipment, and massively upscale production, and make enough treats to meet demand, and to sell to stockists too!

‘Overheads kill small business’

For more than five years ‘Toffee Towers’ was our world, but when our landlord decided to double our rent after our five year lease came to an end, at the same time as business rates, increasing ingredients costs, and energy bills hitting us hard, we decided that if the company is going to survive, we’ve got to cut our overheads quickly!. We needed somewhere cheaper!

In late November 2024, while we were sending out hundreds of festive selection boxes, demolition work was going on all around us, as the move out was starting, even though we had nowhere to move to – not yet…! The day before Christmas Eve, all our machinery, equipment, everything went into storage and we locked the doors for the last time.

2025…

…On the 2nd of January, we drove up to Glasgow in search of new premises, and eventually/luckily (!), found somewhere great! We hoped to move in within a few weeks, it took a few months – expensive months! But in March ’25 we, and our stuff, drove up to Port Glasgow, and we moved in to our new ‘home’.

Our range has also grown over the years, with more than a dozen products, we’re not doing too bad for such a tiny company! There’s still a lot to do though, production needs to expand further so that we can fulfil more of our potential, but we’ll get there! We’re nothing if not passionate about our products, and they deserve to be more widely available.

Our ‘factory’ is very much a vegan factory, we’re vegans, all our ingredients are vegan.  Our alternative to milk chocolate is Rainforest Alliance certified, ensuring farmers and land workers get a fair share of the profits and prohibiting slavery, and although our products do contain some palm oil, it is RSPO certified as sustainably sourced, and from segregated crops.

A little about us, our ‘back story’…

I (Corin) was a photographer before all this sweet making, mainly in fashion. I’ve worked with many animal rights charities/groups over the years too, including the wonderful Viva!, the Vegan Society, the Vegetarian Society, and Peta (UK).  If you know the dairy industry campaign Viva! ran years back of a suited gent sucking on a cow’s udders – that’s me that is! But the horrors of the fashion industry took its toll on my soul, and I wanted out. Toffee became my new vocation, and I think the teenage me would be happy to see I’ve become a confectioner!

Lesley used to work at Viva!, and has a long history in the vegan and animal rights community, and has been running her own diet & exercise classes since 2008. It’s good to know a thing or two about diet and fitness when you spend all day surrounded by sweets!