The great golden syrup rebrand should have leaned into the weird

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The first pub I worked in had a row of paintings hung opposite the bar — abstract watercolours in mismatched frames. I spent a summer polishing glasses in front of these paintings before I thought to look at them — I mean, really look — at which point I discovered they were not abstract in the slightest, but detailed depictions of encounters so intimate that I can’t describe them here. Once you’d clocked the figures in the paintings, they couldn’t be unseen. I spent future shifts wondering how anyone could walk by this Kama Sutra extension pack and not gasp. 

I thought back to this perspective shift on Tuesday when I learnt a shocking truth about Lyle’s Golden Syrup. In case you haven’t heard, it is this: the lovely green-and-gold logo does not depict a sleeping lion but a dead one — a rotting one, in fact! — and the abstract dashes that surround it are not the pebbles you took them for, but a swarm of honey bees that have made their home inside the carcass. The logo was commissioned by founder Abram Lyle in 1883 and inspired by the biblical image (Old Testament, of course) of Samson finding honey inside the body of a lion he had slain. 

This unusual emblem is the Guinness World Record holder for “oldest branding”. Or rather, it was. The trivia came to public attention when Tate & Lyle announced this week that it was doing away with the traditional logo on most packaging (the paint-tin-style original will retain its heritage look). The new branding is a simplified lion’s head with a single bee in its barnet. It’s not bad exactly, but how good can a logo be if it would look equally at home on a juice box and an eco surface spray? 

The new logo “brings Lyle’s into the modern day”, said brand director James Whiteley. Some media outlets have taken this to mean it is a “woke” move. Anti-Christian, even. This is probably incorrect. Look in your shopping basket, and you will see that most product logos are being stripped of their visual complexity. Mr Pringle has lost his hair. The Burger King burger has lost its shiny bun. This is because, these days, everyone (not just young people!) usually engages with brands through a screen of some sort, where simple vector graphics work best. A 19th-century illustration that contains, say, two-dozen tiny bees, is a digital nightmare. 

What’s funny though is that the OG lion logo is in many ways perfectly suited to today’s young consumers. First, it’s so ornate and old fashioned that it definitely classifies as “pantry porn”, the name given to the current widespread obsession with creating aesthetically beautiful food stores. 

Second, the logo is really very weird — which is a good thing for a generation that lusts after the surreal and slightly sideways. Chin Chin, the go-to white wine for the image conscious, has a half-dressed red demon on its label. Bao, an extraordinarily successful chain of Taiwanese restaurants in London, has a lonely, unhappy-looking “salary man” on its merch. And dead or dying things have appeared on the cover of some of the most voguish books of the past few years — Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona, for example, which features a 17th-century painting of a lamb trussed for sacrifice. The youth-friendly move would have been to make the lion look more dead. A lolling tongue perhaps, like Nirvana’s famous X-eyed smiley face. 

The Lyle’s lion had it all: both beautiful and weird. But even a great logo is just a logo. What’s inside matters more. On this front, it’s unfortunate that the recent spike of attention will have prompted many to Google “What actually is golden syrup?” and discover that it is not a wholesome mother’s remedy (and it’s definitely not honey), but rather a byproduct of industrial sugar refining with the same nutritional value as a white sugar cube. And that’s a problem that a rebrand can’t fix. 

harriet.fitchlittle@ft.com