Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry

John went to London to be apprenticed at the teahouse of Sanderson Fox and Company. While in London he went to see the warehouses of the East India Company, and watched the sale of commodities such as coffee and cocoa. He wrote to his father that he was convinced that there was potential in the exotic new bean, although he was not yet clear what that potential was.

In 1824 the twenty-three-year-old John returned to Birmingham and set up a tea and coffee shop of his own on Bull Street, next door to his brother Benjamin’s draper’s shop. His father lent him a small sum of money and said he must ‘sink or swim’, as there were no further funds. John proudly announced the opening of his shop in the local paper, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, on 1 March. After setting out his considerable experience ‘examining the teas in the East India Company’s warehouses in London’, he drew the public’s attention to something new: a substance ‘affording a most nutritious beverage for breakfast . . . Cocoa Nibs prepared by himself’.

John Cadbury’s tea and cocoa shop in Bull Street, Birmingham, in 1824.

John Cadbury took advantage of the latest ideas to draw business to his shop, starting with the window. While most other shops had green-ribbed windows, John’s had innumerable small squares of plate glass, each set in a mahogany frame, which it was said he polished himself each morning. This alone was such a novelty that people would come to see it from miles around. On peering through the glass, prospective customers would be intrigued to see a touch of the Orient in the heart of smoky Birmingham. The many inviting varieties of tea, coffee and chocolate were displayed amongst handsome blue Chinese vases, Asian figurines and ornamental chests. Weaving his way through all this exotica was a Chinese worker in Oriental dress. Those who ventured inside were greeted by the rich aroma of coffee and chocolate; John ground the cocoa beans himself in the back of the shop with mortar and pestle. Word of John Cadbury’s quality teas and coffees soon spread amongst the wealthiest and best-known families in Birmingham: his customers included the Lloyds, Boultons, Watts, Galtons and others.

Meanwhile, through the Quaker network, John met Candia Barrow of Lancaster. The Barrows and the Cadburys had already developed very close ties through marriage. In 1823 John’s older sister Sarah had married Candia Barrow’s older brother. This was followed in 1829 by the marriage of John’s older brother Benjamin to Candia’s cousin, Candia Wadkin. So in June 1832, when John married Candia Barrow, it was the third marriage in a generation to link the two Quaker families. It proved to be a very happy union.

As John’s shop prospered, he could see for himself the growing demand for cocoa nibs. He took advantage of the large cellars under the shop to experiment with different recipes, and created several successful cocoa powder drinks. So confident was he of the future of this nutritious and wholesome drink that he decided to take a further step: into manufacturing.

In 1831, John rented a four-storey building in Crooked Lane, a winding back street at the bottom of Bull Street, and began to test produce cocoa on a larger scale. The idea of using machines to help process food was in its infancy, but to help him with the roasting and pressing of beans he installed a steam engine, which evidently was a great family novelty. According to his admiring aunt Sarah Cash, everyone in the family ‘had thoroughly seen John’s steam engine’. After ten years he had developed a wide variety of different types of cocoa for his shop: flakes, powders, cakes, and even the roasted and crushed nibs themselves.

Candia at the time of her marriage to John Cadbury.

Meanwhile, Candia and John started a family, and moved to a house with a garden in the rural district of Edgbaston. Their first son, John, suffered intermittently from poor health. Richard Cadbury, their second child, was born on 29 August 1835, and was followed by a sister, Maria, and then George, born on 19 November 1839. The arrival of two more sons, Edward and Henry, would complete the family.

To the boys’ delight their parents placed a strong emphasis on the enjoyment of an outdoor life. Their house had a square lawn, recalled Maria. ‘Our father measured it round, 21 times for a mile, where we used to run, one after another, with our hoops before breakfast, seldom letting them drop before reaching the mile, and sometimes a mile and a half, which Richard generally did.’ Only then were they allowed in for breakfast, ‘basins of milk . . . with delicious cream on top and toast to dip in’. After this early-morning ritual, John set off to work. ‘I can picture his rosy countenance full of vigour,’ says Maria, ‘his Quaker dress very neat with its clean white cravat.’

A memorable delight for the boys was the arrival of the railway in Birmingham. Britain was in the grip of railway fever, and the Grand Junction Railway steamed into Birmingham from Manchester in 1837. Within a year, a line opened that covered the hundred miles between Birmingham and London. The treacherous two-day journey to the capital by horse and coach was reduced to a mere two hours by steam train. The coming of the railway made a deep impression on the growing family. ‘I got a railway train, first second and third class carriages, with an engine and tender,’ seven-year-old Richard wrote enthusiastically to his brother in 1842. For his father, however, it opened up whole new possibilities for trade.

At the age of eight, Richard was sent away to join his older brother John at boarding school. George studied with a local tutor who had a decidedly individualistic view on the best way to deal with boys. He aimed to instil mental and physical fortitude with a diet of classics and combative sports, including occasional games of ‘Attack’ which he devised himself, and which involved arming the boys with sticks. Somehow George came through the experience with a sound knowledge of French and Virgil, and a keen appreciation of home life. He remembered his childhood as ‘severe but happy’, with an emphasis on discipline and a lifestyle that was ‘bare of all self indulgence and luxury’.

Both George and Richard formed vivid impressions of trips to see their mother’s family at Lancaster. Their maternal grandfather, George Barrow, in addition to running a draper’s shop, had created a prosperous shipping business with trade to the West Indies. His grandchildren were allowed to climb the tower he had built in the grounds of his house, from where they had a stunning view of Morecambe Bay and on occasion his returning ships, sometimes banked up three at a time on the quayside beyond. Sea captains came to visit, and would regale the children with tales of wide seas and foreign lands, the wonders of travel and the horrors of the slave trade.

By 1847 John Cadbury’s Crooked Lane warehouse had been demolished to make way for the new Great Western Railway. Undeterred, John expanded his manufacturing into the Bridge Street premises, and was soon joined by his older brother Benjamin. By 1852 the two brothers were in a position to open an office in London, and they later received a royal accolade as cocoa manufacturers to Queen Victoria. It was around this time that they dreamed up a plan to create a model village for their workers, away from the grime of the city; they even designated one of their brands of cocoa ‘The Model Parish Cocoa’.

In 1850, when he was almost fifteen, Richard joined his father and uncle at Bridge Street, and was doubtless aware of their grand ambitions. With his father often away, he threw himself into the trade with ‘energy and devotion’, observed one relative. Richard kept his father informed of day-to-day events: ‘James is very steady at the engine, keeps it at a regular pace and in beautiful order and is careful not to waste any money over it. The girls do their work cheerfully, but want a good deal of looking after . . . ’

The pressures of learning the trade did not stop Richard indulging his love of sport. He and George were passionately fond of skating, and would often rise at 5 a.m. so as to be on the ice before dawn. ‘Only those who have made the effort know the exhilaration of skating in the early morning and watching the light gradually break and the beauty of the sunrise,’ wrote George. One young friend of his sister Maria remembered that Richard ‘used to fairly dazzle us with his skating’. But events were conspiring against such relaxed pursuits.

Cocoa sales had begun to decline during the economic depression of the ‘Hungry Forties’, when a slump in trade, rising unemployment, bad harvests and a potato blight in England and Scotland in 1845 combined to create widespread hardship. Many small businesses struggled, but for the Cadburys the irrevocable blow came in the early 1850s, when Candia was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

These painful years left their mark on Richard and George. They witnessed the inexorable decline first of their mother then of their father, then the neglect of the factory, as though it too was afflicted with a malady for which there was no known cure. John still occasionally walked through the factory in his starched white collar and neat black ribbon tied in a bow, but the enthusiasm that had prompted him to develop the venture over a period of thirty years was gone. He paid scant attention to the piles of cocoa beans accumulating in the stock room. The hard-won accolade as cocoa manufacturer to Queen Victoria no longer excited him. A year after Candia’s death he dissolved the partnership with his brother Benjamin. Gradually his absences became more prolonged as he searched for a cure for his arthritis, and the family firm began to lose its good name.

These were the pressing concerns in young George Cadbury’s mind when in 1857, like his father and grandfather before him, he too was sent away to learn his trade as an apprentice. His sister Maria had taken his mother’s place in the home looking after the younger children. His older brother Richard was taking on more responsibility for his father’s business. George was keen to master the trade by working in a grocery shop in York run by another Quaker, Joseph Rowntree.

Once past York’s famous city walls, the seventeen-year-old George Cadbury found himself in a maze of winding old streets, with irregular gabled houses, the overhang of their upper storeys making the streets narrow and dark. At the bottom of the Shambles, the road opened onto a busy thoroughfare called Pavement. Almost directly opposite, at number 28, stood Rowntree’s shop, a handsome eighteenth-century terraced house, tall and narrow, its walls made crooked by subsidence. There was little in the colourful thoroughfare outside to hint at the austerity and long hours that awaited George inside the shop.

The strict rules of conduct that Joseph Rowntree expected his numerous apprentices to obey were clearly set out in a Memorandum:

The object of the Pavement establishment is business. The young men who enter it as journey men or apprentices are expected to contribute . . . in making it successful . . . It affords . . . a full opportunity for any painstaking, intelligent young man to obtain a good practical acquaintance with the tea and grocery trades . . . The place is not suitable for the indolent and the wayward . . .

The Memorandum specified every detail of the boys’ lives: no more than twenty minutes for a meal break, only one trip home a year, and the exact hours at which they were to return each night: in June and July they were allowed to walk outside in the evenings until ten o’clock; during all other months the curfew was earlier.

Living at the house were Joseph Rowntree’s sons, including twenty-one-year-old Joseph and nineteen-year-old Henry Isaac. Joseph was tall and dark with intense features, the natural severity of his own character complemented by years of Quakerly upbringing. His father had taken him to Ireland on a Quaker Relief Mission in 1850 during the potato famine, and the experience had left a lasting impression on him: Joseph remembered how slow starvation turned the young and comely into walking corpses. Numberless unknown dead lay in open trenches or where they had fallen by the side of the road. For the serious-minded Joseph it had been a shocking lesson in the effects of poverty. His younger brother Henry provided a contrast to Joseph’s austerity. Somehow the full Puritan weight of Quaker training did not sit quite so readily on him; he had a sense of fun, and could be relied upon to lighten the mood.

While working in Rowntree’s grocery shop, George saw at first hand how the family’s cocoa business came into existence. Joseph senior had for many years been close friends with a local businessman, Samuel Tuke, who ran a cocoa factory and shop at Castlegate, not far from the Rowntrees’ Pavement shop. The business had been in the family for three generations, but when Samuel Tuke became ill in 1857, his sons did not want to take on the cocoa factory. The elder Joseph Rowntree offered to help his friend by placing one of his own sons in the business. As Rowntree’s eldest sons were due to take a stake in his grocer’s shop, the opportunity to work for the Tukes fell to his third son, Henry Rowntree. In 1860, Henry duly set out to Castlegate to embark on his own career in cocoa.

Not long after this, George Cadbury returned to Birmingham, although he had barely completed three years as an apprentice. Perhaps he was fired up by seeing Henry Rowntree start his new venture, and was eager to begin making his own way. But it also seems likely that John was well aware of his third son’s ability and dedication, and needed his help.

To the employees at Bridge Street the two young Cadbury brothers were curiously ‘alike and unalike’. Richard was seen as ‘bright and happy with a sunny disposition’. He claimed he would be happy simply to rescue the business and turn it around to make a few hundred pounds a year. George was much more driven. In the words of his biographer, Alfred Gardiner, he had ‘more of an adventurer’s instinct . . . The channel of his mind was narrower and the current swifter.’ Despite his ambition, he could see no simple solution to the business’s problems. As the brothers deliberated during the spring of 1861 in the gloomy Bridge Street factory, the prospect seemed a dismal one. From their cramped office they could see the empty carts banked up in the yard awaiting orders. It was not immediately obvious what they could do that their father and uncle had not already tried.

The great hope, of course, was to come up with a breakthrough product. They did in fact have something in mind that their father had been working on before family difficulties drained his energy. It was a product very much of the moment, with healthful overtones, called Iceland Moss. The manufacturing process involved blending the fatty chocolate bean with an ingredient that was thought to improve health: lichen. It was then fashioned into a bar of cocoa that could be grated to form a nutritious drink. Richard had a flair for design, and could see the possibilities for launching Iceland Moss. It would be eye-catchingly displayed in bright yellow packaging with black letters that boldly proclaimed the addition of lichen, complete with the image of a reindeer to show how different it was from anything else on the market. He and George hoped to promote the health-giving properties of Iceland Moss, but would the untried combination of fluffy-textured lichen and fatty cocoa bean excite the English palate?

Apart from developing new products, the brothers also had to find new customers. Their father had only one salesman, known at the time as a ‘traveller’. His name was Dixon Hadaway, and he covered a vast swathe of the country, from Rugby in the south far up into the Scottish Highlands, visiting grocers’ shops to promote the company’s variety of cocoa wares. He took advantage of the new railway to cover the long distances between towns, but was often obliged to travel by pony and trap or even on foot. Despite the challenges of getting around, Dixon Hadaway was evidently determined to keep up appearances, and was always smartly attired with a tall top hat and dark tweed coat, although it was invariably crumpled from long hours of travelling. It seems he was appreciated by his customers, who claimed that he was so punctual that they could set their clocks by his visits. But punctuality and enthusiasm alone were not enough to win new orders. People could not be expected to buy Cadbury’s goods if they had never heard of them. George was clear: they needed more capital to fund a sales team.

To finance this, the brothers discussed how to manage the business more efficiently. Their solution was to return to their Puritanical roots: ‘work, and again work, and always more work’. George enthusiastically planned to cut all indulgence from his life: games, outings, music, every luxury would go. Every penny he earned would be ploughed back into the business. This was harder for Richard, who was planning to marry in July.

A photograph survives of Richard’s fiancée, Elizabeth Adlington, whose classic good looks are evident in spite of her serious expression and the limited scope permitted for the enhancement of feminine Quaker beauty. Her face appears unadorned, her hair parted down the middle and pulled back severely. She wears a full skirt and crino-line, covered by a long black cloak and dark bonnet – Quaker forefathers deeming this quite sufficient adornment to attract a male. Richard was drawn to her ‘bright and vivacious’ manner. In preparation for bringing home a wife, he had purchased a house on Wheeley’s Road, about two miles from the factory. Spare moments were spent creating a garden, transferring cuttings of his favourite plants from the rockery in his father’s garden. ‘My little home is beginning to look quite charming now it is nearly completed,’ he told his youngest brother Henry. There was just the furniture to buy before the wedding.

During the spring of 1861 the tone of the brothers’ discussion changed. As Quakers, they were accustomed to finding answers in silent prayer. They had a duty to their workforce, and there were family obligations to consider. Since their mother had died, their sister Maria had taken her place, caring for the younger members of the family. Now their father was in urgent need of help. They too must listen to the clear voice of conscience, mindful of their debt to man and God. They too must endeavour to do their best. Whatever their misgivings, they had no real choice. In April the two young brothers took over the running of the factory.

There was one last hope. They had each inherited £4,000 from their mother. Determined to save the family dream of a chocolate factory, they staked their inheritance down to the last penny. If they failed to turn the business around before the capital was gone, they would close the factory.

Chapter 2

Food of the Gods

Richard and George soon found themselves running down their inheritance fast just to keep afloat. The first year was worrying. By the end of 1861 Richard’s share of the loss was recorded at £226, and George registered a similar figure. More capital from their inheritance would be needed. Richard, who had the added responsibilities of married life, could not help imagining the next year’s losses. Perhaps they were not businessmen. Was this the beginning of a slow and inevitable decline to bankruptcy?

The brothers tried to calculate how long their capital would last. In the absence of any other source of funds, they had to make further cutbacks. Even basic pleasures such as drinking tea and reading the morning paper were now sacrificed. Each day started at six in the morning and did not end until late in the evening, with a supper of bread and butter eaten at the factory. ‘This stern martyrdom of the senses,’ observed one of George’s colleagues years later, ‘drove all the energy of his nature into certain swift, deep channels’, creating an extraordinary ‘concentration of purpose’. Any small diversion or treat was dismissed as a ‘snare’ that might absorb precious funds.

While George focused on purchasing, policy and development, Richard tackled sales. The infrequent appearances of their traveller, Dixon Hadaway, in the office made a vivid impression on the staff. ‘It was a red letter day,’ said one office worker. ‘It was real fun to listen to his broad Scotch, as we could only understand a sentence here and there.’ Hadaway loved his old tweed coat, which he had worn since the Crimean War, ‘and I can still remember him extolling the beauties of the cloth and its wearing qualities’.

Dixon Hadaway, the Cadbury brothers’ first traveller, whose territory extended from Rugby to northern Scotland.

Richard joined Hadaway on some of his travels, and frequently took out the pony and trap to drum up business. He also hired some additional full-time travellers. Samuel Gordon was to target Liverpool and Manchester, while John Clark, recommended by a Quaker cousin, was hired to take on the whole of England south of Birmingham. Richard sent him first to London, but in a matter of weeks Clark found business there so bad he begged to be transferred back to Birmingham, as he feared he was wasting both his and the firm’s time. A letter survives from Richard, urging him not to give up on London and its suburbs:

We do particularly wish this well worked, as we believe it will ultimately repay both us and thyself to do so, and thou may depend if thou dost thoroughly work it, we will see nothing is lost to thee whether with or without success . . . It is important for us both to pull together for we have so much to do to conquer reserve and prejudice, and thou may be assured we will do our part in this in the way of improvements in style and quality of our goods.

To cover more ground, George too began to travel, taking on Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Letters from Richard’s young wife Elizabeth show that his journeys away from home became more frequent. ‘We have come nearly to the end of another day and think of thee as that much nearer returning,’ she wrote to him in Glasgow in July 1862, a year after their marriage. ‘We shall all be happy together if thou hast had a prosperous time.’ In his enthusiasm to increase turnover, Richard himself would go into the warehouse to package the orders, ‘not only in the early days when hands were few, but even in his later years’.

During 1862, since both brothers were often away, they hired more office staff. One young worker who showed great promise was William Tallis. Orphaned as a child, he had had very little education, but impressed everyone with his ability and enthusiasm. They also employed their first clerk, George Truman, who recalls ‘working, as did Mr George, till eight or nine every night, Saturdays included’. George Truman evidently also tried his hand at selling to the shops in Birmingham. A novice salesman, he generously offered samples for customers to try. These proved so popular that he soon ran out, and returned to the factory ‘in great distress’ because ‘one customer had eaten half his samples!’ He was reassured when ‘Mr George said he could have as many samples as he wanted and he went out the next day quite happy.’

To address the problem of the product being eaten before it left the factory, a system known as ‘pledge money’ was put into effect. Each day a penny was awarded to any worker who had managed not to succumb to temptation. Every three months the pledge money was paid out: one particularly abstemious employee remembers he accumulated so much that he was able to buy a pair of boots. Workers were also rewarded for punctuality. For those who arrived promptly at 6 a.m. there was a breakfast of hot coffee or milk, bread and buns.

Unaccountably, the brothers found there was a lack of public enthusiasm for Iceland Moss, in which they had invested their early hopes. They continued to develop new lines of higher quality, introducing a superior Breakfast Cocoa, as shown in their detailed sales brochure of 1862. This was followed a year later by Pearl Cocoa, then by Chocolat du Mexique, a spiced vanilla-flavoured cake chocolate. They improved existing brands such as Queen’s Own Chocolate, Crystal Palace Chocolate, Dietetic Cocoa, Trinidad Rock Cocoa and Churchman’s Cocoa – a sustaining beverage for invalids. ‘So numerous are the sorts,’ reported the Grocer magazine of these different types of cocoa drink, ‘the purchaser is much puzzled in his choice.’ So puzzled in fact that no single one of Cadbury’s products seemed to excite the palate of the Midlands’ growing population.

Richard was keen to find new ways to promote their different types of nutritious beverage. Apart from notifying the trade through the Grocer, in 1862 he designed a stall to exhibit their products at the permanent exhibition in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in south London. The brothers also paid for a stall exhibiting their wares in the Manchester Corn Exchange. But it was not enough. An elusive ‘something’ was missing from their products, preventing them from exploiting the clearly delicious cocoa bean. Their travellers returned with disappointing orders, putting the struggling business in further jeopardy.

In battling to save the Bridge Street factory there was one issue that the brothers had failed to tackle. However inventive their new recipes, and however adventurous the palate of the British public, by turning cocoa beans into a drink, they were faithfully following centuries of tradition. Despite its long and colourful history of cultivation, by the mid-nineteenth century the dark cocoa bean was mostly consumed in a liquid form, largely unprocessed and unrefined, as it always had been. The Cadbury brothers, like everyone else, were still thinking along lines rooted in ancient history.

Like many Victorians, Richard Cadbury had a passion for foreign culture and history. With his life circumscribed by long hours of labour in provincial England, he longed to travel beyond Europe. He had been brought up on vivid tales of the exotic lands where cocoa originated, and the history of its cultivation. ‘It was one of the dreams of our childhood,’ he wrote, ‘to sail on the bosom of that mighty river whose watershed drains the greater part of the northern portion of the continent of South America, and to explore the secrets of its thousand tributaries that penetrate forests untrodden by the foot of man.’ He was particularly interested in the long and colourful history of cocoa in South America and Mexico, a history that gave intriguing glimpses as to how the bean might best be cultivated and consumed.

Richard had never actually seen a cocoa plantation, and attempted to satisfy his curiosity by collecting stories of explorers. While the traders he had met in Mincing Lane had never been short of anecdotal accounts, he could find out more by corresponding with experts at the tropical botanical gardens in Jamaica, and the Pamplemousse Botanic Gardens in Mauritius. Closer to home, knowledge of tropical species was increasing through the famous glasshouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The magnificent Palm House had recently been completed, and in the early 1860s work was just beginning on the Temperate House. Botanists knew cocoa by its scientific name – Theobroma cacao, or ‘Food of the Gods’ – given to the plant in 1753 by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus.

‘This inestimable plant,’ Richard wrote, ‘is evergreen, has drooping bright green leaves . . . and bears flowers and fruit at all seasons of the year.’ It flourished only in humid tropical regions close to the equator, and was acutely sensitive even to slight changes in climate. The cocoa pod itself he described as ‘something like a vegetable marrow . . . only more elongated and pointed at the end’. In contrast to European fruit trees, the pods grow directly off the trunk and the thickest boughs, from very short stalks, rather than from finer branches. The outer rind of the pod is thick, and when ripened becomes a firm shell. Inside, embedded in a soft, pinkish-white acid pulp, are the seeds or beans – as many as thirty or forty within each pod.