It All Started in a Truro Teashop…

John Cooper Furniss opened his first teashop in the centre of Truro, Cornwall’s capital, in 1886. Every night, he would work into the small hours, preparing gingerbread and fairings ready to serve fresh the next day.

His passion for good food and exacting attention to detail quickly secured the Furniss teashop a reputation for serving up the town’s tastiest biscuits. Soon orders were pouring in from surrounding areas and Furniss had no choice but to expand. Within a decade, Furniss biscuit boxes with their distinctive logo were a standard feature in grocers and provisions shops across Cornwall.

Local Recipes Meet Exotic Ingredients

John was fascinated by his Cornish heritage, and believed strongly in using local suppliers of oats, clotted cream and wheat to make his biscuits. But he also had a bit of a wild streak. He travelled widely and developed a taste for exotic ingredients. He sourced the best molasses, ginger and fragrant spices from across the globe, using them to adapt, refine and perfect traditional recipes that he’d gathered from family and friends over the years.

Furniss and Fairings

Inspired by his wife, who told stories of selling lightly spiced gift biscuits, known as Fairings, at

the Corpus Christi and Whitsuntide Fairs, John resurrected the classic original Cornish Fairings recipe and turned it into Cornwall’s most famous biscuit once again.

Furniss Today

We still follow the same ethos. Indeed, our love for the original recipe Fairings led us to preserve the iconic recipe by establishing an official Fairing trademark in 2007. Furniss are now the only company in the world licensed to make The Original Cornish Fairing™

Today, we send millions of biscuits of all types – fairings, shortbreads, gingerbreads, chocolate biscuits and savoury crackers – all around the world. Then there’s all the fudges and lovely old traditional sweets that we’ve brought back in the past few years.

People love the tastes we make. That’s why they come back for more…