The pun
Marmite’s marketing team are usually quite restrained. The name “Ma’amite” was the exception. Ma’am as in the way one addresses the Queen, mite as in Marmite. A pun on the precise side of acceptable, in a context where almost any pun would land because the rest of the country was busy hanging out bunting.
This was 2012. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The country was sixty years into the reign and decided to celebrate by having a bank holiday weekend, painting the Mall with crowds, running a flotilla down the Thames, and producing approximately every possible commemorative product the British retail sector could conceive of. Ma’amite was Marmite’s contribution.
The jar
Properly nice. Red, white and blue across the label, in classic Union Jack composition. A gold crown sat in the place where the logo usually sits. The lid was red. The Marmite inside was the standard recipe, unchanged. Three hundred thousand jars were produced. That number is small enough to make the jars collectible now, and large enough that they were not entirely impossible to get hold of at the time.
I bought four. Three are still unopened in the cupboard. The fourth I ate at the time, on toast, for the Jubilee weekend itself, with butter and a cup of tea, watching the river flotilla on the television.
The wider context
Marmite has a small but proper history of commemorative jars. Ma’amite. The two Olympic editions in 2012. The various Diamond, Sapphire and other anniversary jars across the decades. The Pride series with the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The recent Walkers and Cathedral City collaborations.
The reason they keep working as collectibles is that the underlying jar is itself iconic. Most commemorative products age badly because the underlying product is forgettable. The commemorative Coca-Cola bottle from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is interesting because Coca-Cola bottles are themselves interesting. The Ma’amite jar is interesting because Marmite jars are themselves interesting. There is no commemorative version of a forgettable brand that succeeds.
What they are worth now
A complete, unopened Ma’amite jar in good condition will currently fetch somewhere between twenty and forty pounds on eBay. Boxed-and-mint versions, with the cardboard outer sleeve some of them came in, can go higher. Not life-changing money, but a real return on a three-pound jar from 2012.
If you have one in the cupboard, leave it there. The 125th anniversary of Marmite is in 2027, and the collectibles market for Marmite jars will tick up around that.
Source: Marmite 2012 release; eBay completed listings.
