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

In 1861, as Richard and George Cadbury embarked on their business life, Quaker guidelines were updated once again, in Doctrine, Practice and Discipline. By now the section on trade had become a sophisticated set of rules, under the heading ‘Advice in Relation to the Affairs of Life’. These covered a wide range of issues: honesty and truthfulness, plain dealing, fair trading, debt, seeking advice from fellow Friends, inappropriate speculation, discipline, and much more. With an increased number of Quakers experiencing worldly success, there was even a section for the children of rich Quakers, to ensure that they were not corrupted but fixed ‘their hopes of happiness on that which is substantial and eternal’. The love of money was ‘a snare, which is apt to increase imperceptibly . . . and gradually withdraw the heart from God’.

Richard and George Cadbury’s entire worldview was shaped by Quaker values. They moulded their early childhood experiences, their learning as apprentices, their social and marriage opportunities, their choice of career, and their all-encompassing view of the wider purpose of their chocolate business.

From the earliest years they had seen their father endeavour to apply Quaker ideals in the community. According to George’s biographer Alfred Gardiner, John Cadbury was deeply concerned about society’s ‘savage indifference to the child’. This was before Charles Dickens made the Victorian public finally take notice of the plight of the ‘Parish Boy’ and the ‘little workus’, in his description of child criminals in Oliver Twist in 1837. In the 1820s, when John was developing his shop on Bull Street, it was not uncommon for children to be carted off from the workhouses ‘like slaves to the cotton mills of Lancashire or to the mines’, to be used there as if they were disposable. John was horrified by the misery and degradation of children trapped in a life of slavery.

His greatest outrage was reserved for the ‘barbarous practice’ of using workhouse boys as young as five as chimney sweeps. Some chimneys were as narrow as seven inches square, and the children could only be induced to climb up inside by straw being lit beneath them, or being prodded with ‘pins’. Before they grew too big to be useful, many suffered twisted spines or damaged joints, or were maimed by falls or burns. When John was informed of a machine that could clean chimneys, he ‘had the courage to call a meeting of Master Sweeps in the Town Hall’, reported the DailyGazette. But his demonstration of the new machine met with strong opposition, as the sweeps were convinced they got better results using boys. After years of campaigning he was delighted when legislation was eventually introduced banning the use of climbing boys.

George and Richard also saw their parents become passionately involved in another major social issue of the time: alcoholism. The consumption of gin had become widespread in the eighteenth century, when many traditional pubs and alehouses were replaced by gin shops which promised oblivion with the tantalising slogan ‘Drunk for a penny. Dead drunk for two pence. Clean straw for nothing.’ This ‘liquid fire’, in the words of London magistrate John Fielding, led to nothing less than ‘hell’. The painter and social critic William Hogarth wrote of gin causing ‘Distress even to madness and death’. Reports of children dying of neglect from their drunken parents were commonplace. There were even accounts of children being killed by their parents, their clothes sold for a pittance for more gin.

By Victorian times the gin shops had become ‘gin palaces’, whose gilded interiors and warm gaslights seduced workers pouring out of mills and mines on payday. As a member of the Board of Street Commissioners in Birmingham, John Cadbury saw at close hand the squalid reality for those beguiled by such temptations, and he and Candia became keen supporters of the Temperance Movement. In 1834, John publicly signed up to become a total abstainer, and he and Candia vigorously took on the town’s drinkers, including even the ‘Moderation Society’, which tolerated modest drinking, with a ‘Total Abstinence Plan’. His researches showed that one house in every thirty in Birmingham ‘was dedicated to the sale of intoxicating drinks’, and that of the city’s 6,593 drunkards, one in ten died each year.

John felt a strong desire to help his fellow citizens who preferred the oblivion of gin to any further struggle with life. In meetings across the town he told them that the money they saved by giving up alcohol could buy a better diet, and compared the hearty meals of roast meat and a quarter loaf that an abstainer could afford to those of a drinker on the same wage, who could bring home little more than a penny loaf. To convince his audience how little goodness there was in a gallon of ale, he lit a saucer of alcohol and watched it vanish in flames. As for the barley in a gallon of beer, he told them, it could be used to make something much more nutritious. At this point he would pass round some of Candia’s barley puddings to demonstrate the joys of repudiating drink.

Candia too became personally involved, and for many years ‘did go from house to house and court to court, circularising tracts and conversing with the people to induce them to discontinue the drinking usage and practices’. John later wrote that she saw it as her ‘duty to seek a personal interview with the landlords of public houses, spirit and beer shops’. These visits were not always appreciated: sometimes ‘she was met by rude and coarse remarks’. But often ‘much tenderness of feeling was displayed, tears flowed freely, with the expression of the desire to get out of the trade’. She almost certainly picked up the consumption that killed her from these trips, but even as her health was declining she continued her crusade, and insisted on making more than two hundred visits to publicans. Richard and George remembered her concerned interest in the children of the poor, who suffered from the consequences of having drunken parents. The Cadburys’ Total Abstinence Plan was so successful that, according to John, ‘very soon the “Moderation Society” sank into oblivion’.

John and Candia Cadbury and their family in 1847.

One tale recorded in Richard Cadbury’s Family Book concerns the old Birmingham workhouse, which was then at the corner of Lichfield Street and Steel House Lane. When John arrived there for his first meeting as an Overseer of the Poor, he was dismayed to find that the distinguished committee, in true Dickensian style, met once a month for a ‘sumptuous repast’, with members filling themselves with ‘the choicest delicacies’, washed down with brandy, before ‘attending to the shivering paupers outside’.

Bubbling over with righteous anger, John set out to expose the ‘illegality and iniquity’ of such banquets. Evidently this was met with some disfavour. In the heated debate that followed, one old gentleman who had never been known to speak on any former occasion was stirred to rise to make a brief but pithy point: ‘I spakes for the dinners!’ Needless to say, John managed to get the practice stopped.

The Birmingham workhouse.

He also served on the wonderfully-named Steam Engine Committee, which was responsible for tackling what he saw as the ‘serious evil’ of smog and smoke. As chairman in the 1840s, he gathered data on the Birmingham chimneys that were emitting the greatest volume of dense black smoke, and put pressure on their proprietors to take action. He was also chair of the Markets and Fairs Committee, which dealt with matters such as unwholesome meats and fraudulent trading. And he won funds as governor of the Birmingham General Hospital to develop its facilities. There was, according to the Daily Gazette, a widespread belief that the poor were operated on to advance medical knowledge, and John would periodically attend surgeries ‘to prevent any unnecessary cruelty to patients of the poorest class’.

Their parents’ example of patient and helpful concern for society’s less privileged members was a mantle that George and Richard accepted as an absolutely normal Quaker duty. Not only did they see it as their moral responsibility to improve the plight of those living in the industrial slums, but saving the chocolate factory also held out the promise of providing employment, thus helping the entire community. Even more fundamental, by developing and promoting cocoa as a drink that everyone could afford, they aimed to provide a nutritious alternative to alcohol.

Despite their diminishing inheritance, George and Richard persevered with their efforts to keep the company afloat. George saw the relationship with the employees as key. Sitting in the stock room at 6 a.m. over breakfast, he encouraged workers to discuss issues in their lives, and tried to help with their education, reading aloud to them and exchanging views on topics of interest or stories from the Bible. By today’s standards such actions might seem paternalistic and even intrusive, but at a time when many people could not read, they were greatly valued. Many staff members spoke of their enjoyment of these small meetings, which were ‘more like family gatherings’. One youth named Edward Thackray recalled how honoured he felt when Mr George called him into his office ‘and they knelt together in prayer over some weighty business question’.

The brothers’ interest in the workers was also practical. In spite of their losses, George and Richard pressed ahead with plans to increase wages, with a new payment structure that tripled women’s pay. A staff fire brigade was organised, which fortunately was never tested by a serious fire in the chocolate works. The brothers introduced the novel idea of a ‘Sick Club’ to help pay the wages of staff who had to take leave for illness. There was an evening sewing class once a week at the factory, during which George read to the group. The firm’s ‘bone-shaker’ bicycle – with iron-rimmed wheels and no springs – was extremely popular, and any employee could take it home if they had learned to ride it. Richard and George were among the first employers in Birmingham to introduce half days on Saturdays and bank holidays.

They even took the staff on leisure outings. According to the Daily Post of 21 June 1864, ‘On Thursday last, Messrs Cadbury brothers . . . with commendable liberality took the whole of their male employees on a delightful trip to Sutton Park. The afternoon was spent by some in playing cricket . . . and others rambling through the park enjoying the invigorating air.’ At five o’clock the whole company ‘sat down to a substantial tea which was duly appreciated’. There was cricket in the summer, and during the winter, ‘when work was a bit slack’, reported office worker George Brice, ‘the appearance of Mr George with his skates was a sure sign that we were to be the recipients of his favour in the shape of a half day’s skating’.

As his business experience grew, George was conscious that a paternal responsibility for the firm’s employees was falling gently on his shoulders, quite naturally from friendly daily contact. The welfare of the staff was woven into the brothers’ lives. The factory was not just a business, it was a world in miniature, and an opportunity to improve society. In the middle of the great big sinful city, George would create a perfect little world, a ‘model chocolate factory’.

But first he had to make a profit.

Chapter 4

They Did Not Show Us Any Mercy

No amount of prayers or hymns could solve one problem: the Cadbury brothers faced stiff competition. The other English cocoa manufacturers ‘showed no mercy’, claimed George, although they spoke with a friendly face and a reasonable voice. From the cramped offices of the Cadburys’ modest factory, their rivals looked unassailable. They sailed expertly on the great seas of commerce, making it look easy, inviting, like an adventure.

In London, the Taylor brothers claimed to be one of the largest cocoa and mustard manufacturers in Britain. They were making very similar products to the Cadbury brothers from their huge cocoa, chicory and mustard manufactory on a large site between Brick Lane and Wentworth Street in Spitalfields. A picture of their works proudly depicted on their sales brochure showed a vast complex of factory buildings with smoking chimneys, and horses and carriages gaily travelling to and fro. Their sales list boasted more than fifty different types of drinking cocoas, including all the familiar lines of Victorian England. Established in 1817, they had gained considerable expertise in cocoa preparation, and claimed their technical knowhow guaranteed the removal of any noxious, greasy oiliness from their delicious products. The firm was huge and, surrounded by the ever-growing London population, continued to grow seemingly unstoppably.

The Taylors were not the Cadbury brothers’ only competition in the capital. There was also Messrs Dunn and Hewett of Pentonville, who sold an enterprising range of cocoas that included Vanilla Shilling Chocolate sold ‘unwrapped’, various types of Chocolate Sticks in tin foil, and a curious Patent Lentilised Chocolate sold in ‘half pound canisters’. The early chocolate drinks made with powdered lentils, tapioca, dried peas or sago to mop up the cocoa fats were possibly not for connoisseurs, but these thick, rich cocoa-soups did satisfy the untried tastebuds of many a Londoner. And for the really hard-up, Dunn and Hewett promoted a slightly fatty ‘Plain Chocolate Sold in Drab Paper’.

In addition to London there were regional centres of chocolate production, notably at York, where the apprentice George Cadbury had himself witnessed the daring and confidence of Henry Rowntree on his entry into the world of the chocolatier. Within two years of starting at Tuke & Co., Henry was in a position to buy out the company’s entire cocoa division.

Henry could see that the Tuke premises, situated in the narrow, winding Castlegate in the heart of the old city of York, were too cramped for the expansion he planned. In buccaneer spirit he bought for £1,000 what he called a ‘wonderful new machine’ for grinding beans. Included in the sale was a motley collection of collapsing buildings at Tanners Moat near the centre of York, which he optimistically described as his chocolate factory: an ancient ironworks, an alehouse, and several cottages in various stages of disrepair, all of them practically falling into the putrid-smelling River Ouse. Henry explored the ruinous site with enthusiasm, smelling only chocolate as he glimpsed the river’s black and treacherous water.

The Rowntree factory at Tanners Moat in York in 1901.

The company’s leading brand had been Tuke’s Superior Rock Cocoa, which Henry duly relabelled as Rowntree’s Prize Medal Rock Cocoa after it won a prize at a local fair. To promote his wares, Henry extolled the virtues of his Rowntree’s Rock Cocoa compared to rival brands. He evidently had a sense of humour and his use of a quotation from Deuteronomy was no doubt appreciated by those listeners who knew their Bible: ‘For their Rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges.’ As Henry embarked on transforming the Tanners Moat works into a modern factory that could churn out his Rock Cocoa to sell across England, George Cadbury knew that this rival had the determination to succeed.

There were other firms in York poised to benefit from the arrival of the railway. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the twelve trains a day leaving London were delivering 275,000 visitors to York in a year. Joseph Terry and his brothers, who had inherited their father’s confectionery business in 1854, took advantage of this new opportunity. Starting back in 1767, their forebears had sold boiled sweets and candied peel to the rich from their enticing sweet shop not far from Rowntree’s grocer’s shop. Opening the shop door ushered the customer into a magical Hansel and Gretel world of sugared strawberries, raspberries, lemons and oranges.

With the arrival of the railways, Joseph Terry was soon selling to customers in more than seventy-five towns across the Midlands and the north of England. To meet the rising demand, he moved his manufacturing in 1862 to a larger site beside the River Ouse, just outside York’s city walls, to which the twice-weekly steam packet brought deliveries of exotic fruits and cocoa. In the 1860s Terry was looking closely at how to diversify his range by making more use of cocoa in chocolate-covered nuts and sweets.

But the Cadburys – and the other cocoa manufacturers – faced their stiffest competition from a giant Quaker concern in Bristol: Fry and Sons. The Frys ran the largest cocoa works in the world, so large it was fast shaping the city of Bristol. Their factory was the size of a small town, their sprawling works easily accommodating all the varied processes of production. This was cocoa-making for England. The Cadburys’ little plant could not compete.

Rather than being daunted by the size of the Fry enterprise, George Cadbury was intrigued. ‘I never looked at the small people or the people who had failed,’ he declared. ‘I wanted to know how men succeeded, and it was their methods I examined, and if I thought them good, applied.’ Through the Quaker network he was able to approach the Frys in Bristol, and found one partner, Francis James Fry, who was prepared to take him under his wing. Francis Fry and George Cadbury formed a loose alliance of English cocoa-makers which met, for convenience, in the London offices of the Taylor brothers.

‘I suppose we had some energy,’ George recalled years later, ‘for Francis James Fry elected to go round with me to see the Cocoa and Chocolate Manufacturers.’ George was surprised by this, remarking, ‘I was a young man in a small business compared to his.’ A year older than George, Francis James was the fourth generation of his family to run the firm. With Fry’s sales approaching a colossal £100,000 a year, he must have felt secure in the knowledge that the young Cadbury brothers were no threat.

George Cadbury had everything to learn about the development of a family firm from his Fry counterpart – and he did. The Bristol firm, he noted, from its earliest years, had had an outstanding reputation for innovation.

The story of the house of Fry opens in Bristol at a time when the city had more in common with the Tudor period than the modern world. Born in 1728 into a Wiltshire Quaker family, Francis James Fry’s great-grandfather, Joseph Fry, who had trained as an apothecary, came to Bristol as a young man seeking an opportunity.

At the time, Bristol was the West Country hub for trade, and as a port was second only to London. On the quayside the harbour opened onto a forest of rigging and sails from a multitude of ships arriving from and departing for the New World. The port was packed with sailors, slaves and merchants, the air heavy with the scent of rum and tar, and marvels from the New World such as sugar and cocoa that were unloaded into wagons and warehouses. In the eighteenth century the Flying Coach, drawn by relays of six to eight horses, made it possible to reach London in two days.

Joseph Fry, a sober figure in his plain Quaker clothes, took a tiny shop in Small Street and began his apothecary business in 1753, at a time when it was still customary for such businesses to keep jars of leeches in the window. As a sideline to his pills and potions he sold cocoa, which he promoted as a health drink, and a highly nutritious alternative to alcohol. Fry’s chocolate drink became popular in fashionable nearby Bath, where smart coffee houses were soon selling it to the aristocracy.

In just eight years, Joseph Fry was in a position to take over the leading cocoa manufacturer in the area, Walter Churchman. While Fry’s cocoa drink consisted of the oily cocoa flakes and powder in suspension in liquid, Churchman’s was clearly superior. Its secret rested on a patent he had taken out in 1729 for ‘an invention and new method for the better making of chocolate by an engine’. This was a water-powered machine that enabled him to create a much finer cocoa powder than anyone else. Once Fry had secured the recipe, his Churchman’s Chocolate became very popular.

Joseph Fry was inventive, and seized his chances to develop his business. By 1764 he had agents promoting his products in no fewer than fifty-three towns, and was in a position to open a warehouse in London. In 1777 he moved his cocoa manufactory to larger premises in the fashionable Union Street, then on the banks of the River Frome, and used water power to drive the cocoa-grinding mills. His business interests were many and varied, and under his concerned gaze and industrial ‘green fingers’ everything he touched flourished. He owned a share in the Bristol China Works, created a type foundry in London, was a partner in a large soap- and candle-making business in Bristol, and bought a share of a chemical works in Battersea. This was some feat for a businessman before the age of railways, telegraphs and telephones, and with little means of communication beyond the Flying Coach and the Penny Post.

In 1795 Joseph’s son, Joseph Storrs Fry, inherited the cocoa business and continued to develop the Union Street works. Since the water flow from the River Frome was not reliable, he took the remarkable step of installing one of James Watt’s first steam engines. To the astonishment of the workers, this clanking, hissing mechanical marvel transformed cocoa production, and was soon regarded as ‘one of the wonders of the World’. According to Fry’s records, the steam power from this engine was diverted ‘by means of a vertical shaft carried up through the factory’ to the third floor, where it turned Britain’s first ‘mechanically driven machine for grinding Cocoa Nibs’. News of the novel idea of using a Watt steam engine for food manufacture prompted comments from across the country. ‘We are credibly informed’, marvelled the Bury and Norwich Post on 6 June 1798, that ‘Mr Fry of Bristol has one of these Engines – improved by an ingenious Millwright of the city – for the sole purpose of manufacturing Cocoa. It is astonishing to what variety of manufactures this useful machine has been applied!’

Apart from installing a steam engine to grind the cocoa beans, Joseph Storrs Fry received a patent from George III to build a new kind of machine to roast them, which he installed in the factory next door. Doubtless he was gratified to find The Times full of praise on 8 August 1801 for the ‘excellent articles produced from his celebrated manufactory’. By the time George Cadbury’s father was opening his tea and chocolate shop in Birmingham in 1824, the Frys were using nearly 40 per cent of the cocoa imported into Britain, and their annual sales had risen to £12,000.

Fry’s grinding machines.

In 1835 the business passed to the third generation of Frys. Brothers Joseph II, Francis and Richard continued to develop the site on Union Street, and pioneered new brands. They launched Pearl Cocoa, which countered the heavy oiliness of the cocoa drinks of the time with the addition of arrowroot, which absorbed the oils. Since Pearl Cocoa also contained less costly ingredients like molasses and sugar, it could be cheaply priced to attract poorer households, and became a huge seller. Homeopathic Cocoa took advantage of the burgeoning interest in health. For the upmarket consumer the Fry brothers introduced a finely ground Soluble Cocoa which was slightly less gritty. All these products could be sold for a fraction of what it cost to manufacture them a hundred years earlier, when a pound of their grandfather’s best cocoas cost over seven shillings, almost as much as the average farm worker received for his weekly wage. These new variations cost around one shilling per pound, while the Frys’ workers were paid ten shillings per week.

The Fry family was noted not only for its innovation, but also for the austerity of its Quaker founders. One worker from the mid-nineteenth century recalled ‘primitive and paternalistic’ conditions: ‘The quiet of Union Street was even more marked between 9.00 to 9.20 when all employees attended a morning meeting. It was not uncommon to see passers stop to listen admiringly to the peaceful strains of a hymn sung by our girls and workmen as a prelude to the working day.’

As Richard and George Cadbury were struggling to establish their firm in Birmingham during the 1860s, according to Fry’s Works Magazine, ‘so great had become the expansion of our trade’ that the factory was inadequate to deal with the ‘orders pouring into the House from every quarter’. At a time when the Cadbury brothers were just beginning to recruit travellers to support Dixon Hadaway, Fry’s travellers reached across England. George learned that a single Fry traveller with a flair for sales managed to secure ninety-five accounts in just four towns: Cheltenham, Stroud, Worcester and Gloucester. Gloucester alone bought £10,000 of Fry’s goods. In the age of the steamship, the Frys also benefited from the Bristol docks that linked the company to Britain’s burgeoning Empire and an ever-expanding horizon. To cap it all, they took advantage of Bristol being a leading naval base and won a contract to supply the British Navy – almost doubling their orders overnight. For the military, cocoa was valuable because it was easy to transport in tins, and was warm and filling for the troops.

From the Cadbury brothers’ loss-making warehouse in Birmingham, the Frys must have appeared invincible. George knew he had a great deal to learn, and travelling with Francis James Fry gave him the chance to find out more about their latest pioneering inventions.

In 1847 the Fry brothers had introduced a novelty into the Victorian market. They had experimented with mixing their cocoa powder with its by-product, the excess cocoa fat. Whether by accident or design, they hit upon a way of blending the two ingredients with sugar to make a rich creamy paste. This concoction was then pressed into a mould and left to set. The result was the first solid chocolate bar in Britain. It was a breakthrough: a way of mass-producing a chocolate product that could be eaten instead of being consumed as a drink. This made chocolate portable, and turned it into a totally new kind of snack that could be carried on a railway journey or taken to work. They called it Chocolat Délicieux à Manger.

Fry’s new product held no excitement for those with a really sweet tooth. It was bitter, coarse and heavy, and probably only of interest to the dedicated few who also possessed a strong jaw. Initially sales were slow. Undeterred, the Fry brothers had glimpsed a sweeter, more solid future. They set to work on more recipes for chocolate confectionery that could be produced in bulk. Secretly they experimented with a new kind of white minty cream. This was made by boiling sugar in an open pan, whipping it to an opaque creamy consistency and adding mint flavourings to give it a fresh taste. After the minty cream had cooled and been cut into sticks, these were dipped in luxurious dark chocolate. By 1853, Fry’s frock-coated travellers were opening their sample cases to reveal a brand new product: Fry’s delectable chocolate-coated Cream Sticks. Shopkeepers were amazed when they tasted the first chocolate confectionery produced on a factory scale; it was rich and Christmassy, a real treat. Better still, mass production meant that the price was significantly lower than that of hand-made confections.

The recipe proved to be a success, and within a few years the Cream Sticks were reformulated as a new type of chocolate bar. The chocolate for these ‘morsels of delight’, as they were called in Fry’s literature, was formed into a thin, light paste. The mint cream was set in hundreds of tiny moulds and taken to covering rooms, where ‘scores of young damsels’ with chocolate trays coated the batches. In 1866 the first wagonloads of Fry’s Chocolate Cream found their way to the grocers and sweet shops of Victorian Britain. Preliminary sales of Fry’s minty chocolate sensation may have been modest, but there was growing interest – and not just from British customers.

French chocolatiers, who had long had a reputation for exquisite hand-made confections, were also exploring ways to produce them in bulk. Just outside Paris at his chocolate works on the River Marne in Noisiel, Émile Menier hit upon a process not dissimilar to Fry’s. He had inherited his business from his father, a chemist, who had originally used cocoa sweetened with sugar as a coating for his pills. Émile Menier developed the cocoa side of his father’s business, and by the mid-nineteenth century he had created a method for pressing dark chocolate into a mould. Eye-catchingly wrapped in chrome-yellow paper, it was the first solid chocolate bar manufactured in France, and it proved so successful that Menier’s output quadrupled in ten years, reaching almost 2,500 tons in the mid-1860s, a quarter of the country’s total output. Émile was able to invest more funds in his factory. Originally powered by a humble watermill, it was now equipped with shining new steam turbines, creating such a splendid spectacle that the locals called it ‘the cathedral’. Much of Menier’s chocolate was exported, and like many European manufacturers, he had his eye on the large populations of Britain’s industrial towns. Soon he was in a position to open a factory in Southwark Street in London.