O-Pee-Chee

The O-Pee-Chee Company, Ltd. was a Canadian confectionery company founded in 1911 that produced candy until the mid-1990s. The company produced its first trading card sets in the 1930s and the name is kept going today through licensing.

The O-Pee-Chee Gum Company got its start in 1911 when brothers John McKinnon (J.K.) McDermid and Duncan Hugh (D.H.) McDermid started to manufacture chewing gum. According to O-Pee-Chee literature, both brothers had been in the gum business and knew the business very well. The brothers had worked for C.R. Somerville, a gum manufacturing plant in London, Ontario. After the Somerville firm was sold to American Chicle Company in 1908 and the plant moved to Toronto, the McDermid brothers took over the box division and eventually purchased it in 1910 (Somerville Paper Box Limited). Shortly thereafter, they started O-Pee-Chee and produced their first box of Gipsy gum.

In terms of company genealogy, the McDermids owned the O-Pee-Chee Company Limited (as renamed in 1921) and Somerville Paper Box Limited until 1944. They sold Somerville Paper Box Limited to Garfield Weston in 1945 and changed their own O-Pee-Chee Co. Ltd. from a public company (since 1921) to a private company. The company was now run by John Gordon McDermid, the son and nephew of the McDermid brothers. The younger McDermid ran the company until his death in 1953 after which Frank Leahy took over the company. Leahy was the President of the O-Pee-Chee Co. Ltd. before he purchased the company from the McDermid estate in 1961. Leahy ran the business until his death in 1980, after which Gary Koreen stepped in and purchased the company from his wife, Mary-Margaret (the daughter of Frank Leahy).

Trading cards were a big part of the O-Pee-Chee business. Their first card sets were produced in the 1930s: five hockey sets between 1934 and 1938, a baseball set in 1937, a Mickey Mouse set in 1938, and a Fighting Forces set in 1939. They made a few more sets in the 1940s, but it wasn't until the late 1950s that the company started to distribute cards on a regular basis.

After Mr. Koreen sold his company to Nestlé Corporation in 1996, he kept the O-Pee-Chee brand name alive in the card collecting market via licences with the Topps Company and Upper Deck Company. From 1996 to 2004, the O-Pee-Chee name was used under license by Topps; from 2006 to present, the O-Pee-Chee name has been used under license by Upper Deck.

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