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

To improve the texture of his chocolate and increase his production, Menier needed extra cocoa butter, the fatty part of the bean. He found a supplier in Weesp, near Amsterdam, where a cocoa-making family firm was run by Coenraad van Houten. Van Houten had managed to solve a problem that had eluded everyone else: how to mechanise the separation of the fat content from the rest of the cocoa bean, which produced cocoa butter as a by-product. As a result his cocoa was purer and more refined than anything else on the market. Exactly how he achieved this was a trade secret, but there was no secret about his sales: his agents were acquiring customers in London, Edinburgh and Dublin.

As a regular visitor to London, George Cadbury could not fail to notice the new products that were becoming available: a purer form of cocoa made by the Dutch, and eating chocolate manufactured as solid bars in bulk. In the 1860s sales of eating-chocolate in England were modest – nothing compared to the established drinking-cocoa brands. Even so, like a flag planted on new territory beating against the wind, they pointed the way to unlock the potential inside the little cocoa bean.

George recognised that the Fry family was better placed than anyone else in Britain to take on the foreign competition. Although none of their cocoas matched the quality of van Houten’s pure Dutch cocoa, Fry of Bristol was the cocoa metropolis of the world. Its four factories on Union Street, towering eight storeys high, seemed as secure as their granite and concrete exteriors. Just as this towering citadel dominated the town, so the bounty within dominated the market. The variety and sheer abundance of Fry’s chocolate temptations put them in a class of their own. The Frys were indeed a beacon, a light to follow.

The Cadbury brothers’ need to produce a popular product was becoming critical. Lacking the money to invest in the moulding machinery that was necessary to mass-produce such luxurious temptations as a chocolate bar, Richard and George struggled on producing cocoa as a drink mixed with questionable starches to absorb the fat. Their new products, Iceland Moss, Pearl Cocoa, Breakfast Cocoa and others, had failed to make an impact, and their losses continued to mount.

In response to yet another grim stocktaking, it fell to Richard to tackle the overdue accounts. ‘We made the lowest class of goods,’ George wrote later, and consequently they had some of the ‘least desirable custom’, who were not always ready or willing to settle their debts: ‘The small shopkeepers were constantly failing.’ Some went under without paying, putting Cadbury at risk of going under as well.

The public showed little appetite for cocoa mixed with lichen.

The brothers had resolved, whatever happened, not to take on any liabilities that they could not meet, or to turn to their father John for additional funds. Not unusually for the time, their only sister, Maria, now in her late twenties, had postponed any thoughts of marriage to devote herself to caring for their father. Inevitably she provided a focal point for family news. Their oldest brother John, after a brief attempt at farming in the West Country, had made the bold decision to emigrate to Australia, and had sailed from the East India Docks in London on 17 December 1863 on the ninety-day journey for Brisbane. Their younger brother Edward was embarking on a home-decorating business, and the youngest, Henry, was still at school. Maria, gentle, patient and unassuming, provided encouragement with a maternal eye.

Richard and George continued to work relentlessly, spending long days on the road selling their cocoas to reluctant grocers and returning to the warehouse to pack the orders themselves if hands were lacking. The shortage of money was proving a strain at home. Richard’s oldest son, Barrow, later recalled a family outing to Pebble Mill, ‘where there was a pretty stream’. His mother, Elizabeth, suddenly felt unwell, but his parents elected ‘to tramp all the way back again when his father would have given so much, had he been able, to take her home in a cab’.

The struggle was also taking its toll on the brothers’ relationship. Richard and George often took very different views about how to proceed. With their offices next door to each other, they were careful to keep any disagreements private, debating their options until one had convinced the other of the best way forward. To their staff they appeared united – according to Elizabeth they won the nickname ‘the Cheeryble Brothers’, after the philanthropic twins in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.

All the brothers’ industry and virtue made no difference. At the end of four years they were facing disaster. ‘All my brother’s money had disappeared,’ George admitted. ‘I had but 1,500 left – not having married.’ There were insufficient funds left of their inheritance to develop a business that was in desperate need of capital for mechanisation. ‘I was preparing to go out to the Himalayas as a tea planter,’ said George. ‘Richard was intending to be a surveyor.’

The Cadbury business was all but dead.

Chapter 5

Absolutely Pure and Therefore Best

George Cadbury was considering one final reckless gamble. It would consume every last penny of his inheritance, but as long as he did not fall into debt or the great disgrace of bankruptcy, he felt it was a risk that had to be taken.

The more he learned about the Dutch manufacturer Coenraad van Houten, the more intrigued George became. Dixon Hadaway told him that van Houten’s refined, de-fatted cocoa was now so popular it was on sale in regional centres like Leeds and Liverpool, as well as London. Gradually George began to realise that this was the model he should follow. Refined cocoa surely held the key to the future.

George discovered that the secret of van Houten’s success lay with an invention he had developed with his father, Casparus, more than thirty years earlier. The van Houtens knew that established methods of boiling and skimming the bean resulted in an indigestible cocoa consisting of over 50 per cent cocoa butter. After experimenting with various designs of mechanical grinders and presses, they eventually perfected a hydraulic press that reduced the cocoa fat to less than 30 per cent. This meant that the often unappealing extras that had formerly been used to mop up the fat were no longer required. The result was a purer, smoother drink that tasted more like chocolate and less like potato flour.

The Dutch process remained secret, and no one in England, not even Fry, had discovered a way to manufacture a purer cocoa. George pondered this possible opportunity. Could this be the way to get ahead of their English rivals? Would the Dutch be prepared to sell the brothers their machine? If they had it, could they turn the factory around by using the cocoa butter produced by the refining process to create fancy chocolates like the French? Suddenly George could see a business future that made sense. Instead of using the bean to create one type of product, a fatty and adulterated cocoa, he could create two different products – pure cocoa and eating chocolate – using the most appropriate bit of the bean for each. A whole new set of possibilities opened up – if he could get only hold of van Houten’s machine.

‘I went off to Holland without knowing a word of Dutch,’ said George, and ‘saw the manufacturer with whom I had to talk entirely by signs and the dictionary’. George, plainly dressed, earnest, frustrated by the language barrier and absolutely sure that the odd-looking machine would save the Cadbury factory, was desperate to charm and persuade van Houten, and take home the prize.

Despite the difficulties in communication, van Houten succumbed, and a Dutch de-fatting machine was sold to the English Quaker gentleman. The records do not reveal the price that was agreed, but it is likely that it accounted for much of George’s remaining funds of around £1,000. He made arrangements to ship the monstrous machine back to Bridge Street. It arrived by canal, and the sturdy cast-iron apparatus, a full ten feet high, was then laboriously transported to the chocolate works. Worse, it was very greedy: its giant hopper had to be fed with a large amount of beans. The brothers had to find a way to shift their new drinking cocoa in volume, and fast.

Van Houten’s cocoa press.

Their preparations were hit by a double tragedy in the family. In January 1866 their younger brother, twenty-two-year-old Edward, died unexpectedly after a short illness. When their older brother, thirty-two-year-old John, wrote home in May from Brisbane to express his grief at the loss, Maria was alarmed to see that his writing appeared unsteady, and the letter was unsigned. Doctors in Australia diagnosed him as suffering from ‘colonial fever’, a form of typhus. News of his death on 28 May followed almost immediately.

George Cadbury in 1866, when the business was close to failure.

Richard Cadbury with his son Barrow in 1866.

The unexpected loss of two brothers in such quick succession made Richard and George feel their responsibilities even more keenly than before. The survival of the family business, and any hopes of future prosperity, depended on this last throw of the dice.

In the coming months, they streamlined production of the new drink. By the autumn, Richard was ready to start designing the artwork for the packaging. At last, in the weeks before Christmas 1866, Cocoa Essence was launched.

It soon became apparent that there was a problem. Unlike the cocoa of their competitors, which went further because of the addition of cheap ingredients such as starch and flour, the pure Cocoa Essence was by far the most expensive cocoa drink on the market. The launch faltered. Customers were scarce. The strain on the brothers was beginning to exact a toll. ‘It was an extremely hard struggle,’ George admitted. ‘We had ourselves to induce shopkeepers to stock our cocoa and induce the public to ask for it.’ It looked as though the gamble had failed.

To the Frys, watching from Bristol, the Cadbury brothers’ move hinted at desperation. Under the management of Francis Fry, the company’s sales reached a staggering £102,747 in 1867. He continued to invest, expanding the premises in Union Street, and following the contract with the navy, Fry’s workforce rose to two hundred.

In 1867, George and Richard made one last effort, exploiting something that other Quaker rivals spurned on principle: advertising. Plain Quakers like the Rowntrees in York believed that a business should be built on the quality and value of its goods. Nothing else should be needed if the product itself was honest. Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself: abhorrent to a man of God. To Joseph Rowntree, proudly established as ‘Master Grocer’ in his shop in York, advertising seemed slightly shabby and unworthy, elevating promotion above the quality of the product. Even though he could see that his younger brother Henry’s cocoa works at Tanners Moat was not taking off as hoped, he did not consider advertising to be the answer. He dismissed it as mere ‘puffery’; he even objected to fancy packaging, and was content to alert his customers to any new product with a restrained and dignified letter. His deeply religious sensibility was offended by the idea of extravagant claims or exaggeration of any kind.

The Frys too had Quaker sensibilities when it came to excessive promotion. With the confidence that comes with over 150 years as a successful family business, Francis Fry saw little need for change. ‘Our early advertisements had a certain coy primness about them,’ conceded Fry’s management in the company’s 1928 Bicentennial Issue. The ‘venerable announcements’ of their original drink in the eighteenth century, Churchman’s Chocolate, consisted of long-winded essays trying to explain why this product was unique and how to obtain it – by Penny Post or from ‘the hands of errand boys’. This had progressed by the early nineteenth century to little homilies that advised the public how to prepare the drink and why it was good for them. But the language remained old-fashioned, describing the firm as an ‘apothecary’. ‘We were full of innocent pride in that period,’ wrote the management. Certainly these notices had nothing in them that would stop readers in their tracks. No gorgeous girl of forthright demeanour with glossy lips and an unmistakeable message in her eye as she drank her cocoa: just a message, hardly readable in small typeface, telling of Churchman’s Chocolate.

To the Cadbury brothers it seemed that advertising could do more. Another company, Pears, was taking advertising to new levels at this time. In 1862 Thomas Barratt, often described as the father of modern advertising, had married into the Pears family, and saw a way of turning a little-known quality product, Pears soap, into a household name by replacing the traditional understatement with a simple, attention-grabbing message. He began by enlisting the help of eminent medical men such as Sir Erasmus Wilson, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, and members of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. At a time when some soap products actually contained harmful ingredients such as arsenic, the medical men were happy to endorse Pears because it was ‘without any of the objectionable qualities of the old soaps’. Barratt created posters and packaging adorned with eye-catching images of healthy children and beautiful women, with the brand name featuring boldly. For the consumer the message was immediate and simple: use this soap and you will be beautiful.

To the Frys, the modern style of poster, with its pithy message, was not unlike ‘a sudden assault’ on the eyes. ‘You get the great news at once,’ declared Fry company literature. ‘You feel that something has struck you and you have, of course, been struck, not by somebody’s fist or stick, but by an idea.’ For many Quaker firms this ‘assault’ on the unsuspecting customer raised ethical concerns, but desperation drove the Cadbury brothers to a different view.

George and Richard knew they had to change the public perception of their pure new drink. Shrugging off their Quaker scruples, they took a gamble and committed to a further investment. Like the Pears team, they asked their salesmen to visit doctors in London with samples of their new product. To the delight of the brothers, this won the support of the obliging medical press. ‘Cocoa treated thus will, we expect, prove to be one of the most nutritious, digestible and restorative of drinks,’ enthused the British Medical Journal. Noting the brothers’ claim that their product was three times the strength of ordinary cocoas and free from ‘excess fatty matter’, the Lancet concurred: ‘Essence of Cocoa is just what it is declared to be by Messrs Cadbury brothers.’

The Cadburys’ timing was excellent, because during the 1860s the purity of manufactured foods was a growing concern for the public. There was very little regulation of the food market, and even staples like bread could be contaminated. The public had first been warned in 1820, when the chemist Frederick Accum published A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, which argued that processed food could be dangerous. By the 1850s, Dr Arthur Hassall had written a series of reports in the Lancet exposing some of the commonly used additives in cocoa production: brick dust, red lead and iron compounds to add colour; animals fats or starches such as corn, tapioca or potato flour to add bulk. By 1860, in response to public pressure, the government introduced the first regulations to prevent the adulteration of food.

Yet still the practice continued. In one government investigation more than half the cocoa samples tested were found to be contaminated with red ochre from brick dust. Consumer guides appeared, telling customers how to test their cocoa and warning that a slimy texture and a cheesy or rancid taste indicated the presence of animal fat. If the cocoa thickened in hot water or milk this was evidence that starches had been added, something you could confirm if your comfort drink turned blue in the presence of iodine. Most worrying of all was the continued use of contaminants, including poisons such as red lead, which were injurious to human health but which enhanced the product’s colour or texture. It was small wonder then that the Grocer hurried to follow the lead of the medical press and sang the praises of the Cadbury brothers’ pure new product: ‘There will be thousands of shop keepers who will be glad of an opportunity to retail cocoa guaranteed to contain nothing but the natural constituents of the bean.’

With this support, in 1867 the Cadburys planned the largest advertising campaign they had ever undertaken. There was no longer a question mark over advertising. They would use it with confidence, and really make the Cadbury name stand out. For the first time, they were effectively rebranding the whole image of cocoa. Their Cocoa Essence was honest, and they intended to shout it from the rooftops. Richard Cadbury came up with a slogan that capitalised on the strengths of their new product: ‘Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best’. They took out full-page advertisements in newspapers and put posters in shop fronts and even on London omnibuses. Soon the Cadbury name, synonymous with the purity of the company’s product, was everywhere. It was unavoidable, rippling around the capital like a refrain from a song. Given half a chance, the Cadbury brothers would have covered the dome of St Paul’s, protested one writer. But at the chocolate works, everyone caught the mood of excitement.

By the autumn of 1868, with the campaign gaining momentum, the staff at Bridge Street grew to almost fifty. David Jones, a former railway goods porter who had longed to be a traveller, vividly recalled his first day: ‘George put a sample in my hand and told me to go wherever I wanted for a week, the only stipulation being that I should not trespass on the grounds of another traveller.’ He chose north Wales, but soon had reason to regret his decision. No one had tasted anything like Cocoa Essence before. ‘I gave hundreds of shop keepers a taste,’ he remembered, ‘only to watch their faces lose their customary shape as though they had taken vinegar or wood worm.’ But Jones would not give up. He managed to secure thirty-five orders, and was gratified when the Cadbury brothers were ‘highly pleased’. Many years later another traveller, John Penberthy, would also remember the thrill of winning orders: ‘The delight of travelling in those ancient days, working towns not previously visited by a Cadbury traveller, surpassed in my opinion . . . the discoveries of Shackleton, Peary or Dr Cook!’

Horse-drawn omnibuses carried the Cadbury brothers’ first poster campaign.

While pressing on with the launch of Cocoa Essence, the Cadbury brothers also followed Fry’s lead with experimental types of eating chocolate. Their father, John Cadbury, had tested out a French eating chocolate before, but now that they had a large volume of creamy cocoa butter as a by-product of their pure cocoa drink they could dramatically increase the manufacture of eating chocolate. Rather than mimic Fry’s rough chocolate bar, Richard and George wanted something altogether more luxurious. They found that when the excess cocoa butter was mixed with sugar and then cocoa liquor was folded back into the mix, it produced a superior dark chocolate bar. Then they went one step further. They wanted to launch a new concept that they hoped would bring the exotic products of the French chocolatier to the popular market. Richard called it the Fancy Box.

Had the Cadbury brothers not been in charge of a chocolate factory that was still faltering slightly, the lavish contents of the Fancy Box would undoubtedly have violated their principles. It represented the most un-Quakerly immoderation and extravagance. Generations of Quakers before them had maintained a beady-eyed vigilance in the pursuit of ‘truth and plainness’. The senses on no account were to be indulged; the path to God demanded a numbing restraint and self-denial. But Richard and George, the apparently devout Quakers, had come up with the ultimate in wanton and idle pleasure. For each Fancy Box was a sensual delight.

The lid opened to release the richest of scents, the chocolate fumes inviting the recipient with overwhelming urgency to trifle among the luxurious contents as a whiff of almond marzipan, a hint of orange, rich chocolate truffle, strawberries from a June garden encrusted with thick chocolate beguiled the very air, all begging to be crushed between tongue and palate. Each one had a French-sounding name, adding yet more forbidden naughtiness: Chocolat du Mexique, Chocolat des Délices aux Fruits, and more.

It is ironic that George and Richard dreamed up these chocolate indulgences at a point when their own lives had become most Spartan. ‘At that time I was spending about 25 pounds a year for travelling, clothes, charities and everything else,’ George wrote. ‘My brother had married, and at the end of five years he only had 150 pounds. If I had married, there would have been no Bournville today, it was just the money I saved by living so sparely that carried us over the crisis.’ It is arguable that the brothers’ unremitting self-denial fuelled their appreciation of sensual extravagance.

In the pursuit of plainness, Quakers spurned most artistic endeavour as a worldly distraction that could divert them from the inner calm that led to God. As a result George and Richard’s father never allowed a piano in the house, and had given up learning his treasured flute. Any form of aesthetic enjoyment, such as theatre or reading novels, was discouraged; only texts of a suitably thoughtful tone such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs were acceptable. As for painting, this was considered a superfluous indulgence that could lead a Quaker astray with a false appreciation of something ‘worthless and base’. But now Richard overturned these rigid rules. Revelling in exuberant splashes of colour, he began a series of paintings himself to be pasted on the covers of the Fancy Box.

Richard had travelled to Switzerland and made sketches of the Alpine scenery. Now these drawings, along with images of the seaside and even his own children, formed the basis of his designs, which were chosen to appeal to Victorian sentimentality. His own young daughter Jessie loved to pose with her favourite kitten. ‘Among the pictorial novelties introduced to the trade this season, few if any excel the illustration on Messrs Cadbury’s four ounce box of chocolate crèmes,’ enthused the Birmingham Gazette on 8 January 1869. ‘It is chaste yet simple, and consists of a blue eyed maiden some six summers old, neatly dressed in a muslin frock, trimmed with lace, nursing a cat.’ To strike a real note of luxury, Richard decided that some of the Fancy Boxes should be covered in velvet, lined with silk, and include a mirror. In every way, Cadbury’s chocolate was to stand for quality. The reviewer writing for the Chemist and Druggist magazine of 15 December 1870 was certainly won over. ‘Divine,’ he declared. ‘The most exquisite chocolate ever to come under our notice.’

It was one thing to dream up recipes for the Fancy Box, but quite another to mass-produce them. ‘When I think how we were cramped up in small rooms at Bridge Street,’ recalled Bertha Fackrell of the Top Cream room, ‘the wonder is to me now that we turned out the work as well as we did.’ A lack of space was the least of their problems. ‘Oh the job we had to cool the work!’ Bertha continued. Although there were small cupboards with ventilators around the room, all too often when staff from the box room came to collect the crèmes and chocolate balls they were still too warm. ‘I remember once we girls put our work on the window sill to cool when someone accidentally knocked the whole lot down into the yard below.’

Sales of the Fancy Boxes increased, and gradually more staff were hired. One new worker, the crème beater T.J. O’Brien, was amazed to find the owners grafting with the workers. ‘During these trying times I never knew men to work harder than our masters who indeed were more like fathers to us,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes they were working in the manufactory, then packing in the warehouse, then again all over the country getting orders.’ O’Brien’s work beating the crèmes was heavy, and ‘often Mr George and Mr Richard would come and give me a help’.

But for all their hard work, reward was not to come easily to the Cadbury brothers. For Richard, busy pouring all his energy into the factory, the enjoyment of success, so longed for, so hard won, was wiped away. His adored wife Elizabeth died at Christmastime in 1868, ten days after giving birth to their fourth child. Suddenly his achievements seemed as nothing. The very centre of his family was gone.

At thirty-three, Richard was left with four very young children. Barrow was the oldest at six, followed by Jessie, who was three, one-year-old William and the new baby, named after Richard. ‘He was everything to our baby lives,’ said Jessie of her father. ‘I can well remember riding on his shoulders and going to him with all our troubles.’ However pressed Richard was at work she recalled, ‘He was so much to us always.’ The loss of his wife, in a Quaker household, required ‘humble submission to God’s will’. The children learned fortitude from their father. For Jessie, the certainty of her father’s love made her feel ‘it was worth braving anything’.

Perhaps because Richard grew much closer to his children after their mother’s death, during the spring of 1869 he found the time to set up a crèche for poor or abandoned children and infants in the neighbourhood, renting a house for the purpose and enlisting the help of a friend, the motherly and highly competent Emma Wilson. Mrs Wilson had been widowed seven years earlier, and had managed to earn an income and raise seven children on her own. She became indispensable, not only in the nursery but also by helping out with Richard’s children at their home in Wheeley’s Road.

Sometimes Richard’s children accompanied him to his office. Barrow had a vivid memory of going to Bridge Street with his father, and delighting in watching boxes being unloaded from the colonies. ‘One day a large boa constrictor emerged and was chased by two men who held it down with sugar and cocoa bags,’ he recalled. ‘It was a revelation that the boa constrictor could bend its body with such force whatever the strain.’ When the frightened boy fled to the Cocoa Essence sieving room, he was soon discovered, ‘and given a lecture on the impropriety of being there’. Hygiene was all-important; no leniency was given even when hiding from a boa constrictor.

Although the Cadbury brothers’ financial position had improved, they could not yet feel secure. None of their capital remained. Their livelihood and their future depended on the public buying their confections, charmed by an image of a blonde, blue-eyed girl holding a kitten and smiling sweetly from the lid of a chocolate box.