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

Richard’s illustration of his daughter Jessie and her kitten.

In York, the Rowntrees, with a quality grocer’s shop in the centre of town and a big chocolate factory by the river, appeared to be enjoying enviable success. But Joseph Rowntree, successful purveyor of superior foods, was worried. The problem lay with his brother Henry, and the chocolate factory at Tanners Moat, which looked more like a medieval castle with its forbidding high walls and blackened windows. It was becoming apparent that Henry had optimistically overreached himself by investing in the rambling complex on the River Ouse. By 1869, after a seven-year battle, his cocoa was still struggling to find a market, and the firm’s future looked uncertain. The prospect of failure was very real.

The lesson of years of stern homilies about honouring debt, plain dealing and trustworthiness began to preoccupy Joseph. He knew perfectly well from the family’s much-thumbed copy of the Rules of Discipline that good Quakers should keep ‘a watchful eye over all their members and those heading for commercial trouble should be warned and if required, helped in their difficulties’. Joseph knew that Henry was in trouble, running his business in a most eccentric manner, with equally eccentric accounting methods. Their father had died shortly after setting Henry up in the cocoa business, and as his older brother, Joseph felt keenly aware of his duty. Much though he delighted in his role as ‘Master Grocer’, he could not allow himself the easy path of putting self-interest first when his brother was in need of help.

At thirty-three, Joseph Rowntree had already won a reputation as a man who took his Quaker responsibilities seriously. Having witnessed the horror of the Irish Potato Famine, he had made the time while running his grocery shop to undertake an exhaustive study of poverty in England. Adopting a true spirit of enquiry, he had attempted to investigate not just the effects but also the causes of poverty. Researching back to the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, he had carefully gathered facts on pauperism, illiteracy, crime and education, leading him to uncover a complex web of connections that could trap a family in poverty. Concerned at the apparent indifference of the authorities, he wrote up his findings as a paper, British Civilisation, which he hoped to present at an Adult School Conference in Bristol in 1864. But even fellow Quakers, such as Francis Fry’s nephew Joseph Storrs Fry II, who was running the conference, feared his essay might ‘cause offence to weak brethren’, and urged him to modify its strong language. The following year Joseph Rowntree published a more measured paper, Pauperism in England and Wales, a landmark study that set out the figures and questioned the role of Church and state in perpetuating social injustice.

Joseph Rowntree in 1862.

Rowntree’s studies had given him confidence in his ability to collect data and analyse problems – skills that he reasoned could help him stabilise his brother’s business. In 1868 he took a bold step, withdrawing his inheritance from the security of the Pavement grocery shop to invest with Henry, hoping to bring order to the chaotic chocolate factory by the river, where Henry was put in charge of production. There was every reason to believe that, properly run, the factory could make headway. After all, other firms were turning a profit from cocoa.

Joseph, who had a keen eye for detail, found much to vex him as he embarked upon a painstaking examination of his brother’s accounts. Henry liked informality, and a number of most irregular practices and unbusinesslike anomalies had blossomed undisturbed in his factory. It seemed that each room, each account book or order book, each pile of receipts, harboured potentially fatal flaws. Joseph was confronted by a parrot in the workroom, and an obstinate donkey with a predilection for steam baths. The parrot distracted the workers, and the donkey failed to meet Joseph’s exacting requirements for the firm’s transport, stubbornly refusing to budge from the warmth of the steam pipes that emerged everywhere from the walls of cottages and outhouses that had been converted into factory buildings. The donkey had to go – to be replaced by a much more versatile handcart.

As for the accounts, Joseph’s detailed personal notebooks from that time are filled with long columns as he tried to get to the bottom of the debts to York Glass, York Gas, the saddler and the parcel delivery service. To resolve discrepancies in the accounts, he was obliged to resort to hearsay to work out the company’s liabilities: ‘Beaumont says he thinks Epps gave a 7% discount upon his lowest whole sale quotation.’ Henry’s staff, like Henry himself, it was clear, were a trifle hazy when it came to the details of the deals they had made. Perhaps that was not surprising, as the staff that had been pared down to the bone. Seven workers managed the key processes of grinding, roasting, rubbing and carrying sacks from the warehouse, each taking turns with heavy work. There were definitely no spare funds to squander on something that Joseph regarded as disreputable as advertising.

As a small antidote to the Mad Hatter logic of the castle, Joseph Rowntree did cast a discerning eye over the competition. Recognising Cadbury’s potential breakthrough with Cocoa Essence, he began to make discreet enquiries as to where he could purchase machinery to make a purer form of cocoa

Relaxed in the knowledge that he was at the helm of the world’s largest chocolate company, Francis Fry found he could delegate the many day-to-day problems involved in running such an establishment to others, and devote time to his numerous philanthropic and public causes. For years he had had a keen interest in the West Country railways, and during 1867 he led a campaign to unite the nineteen separate western lines. In addition, it was his great ambition to help create a national Parcel Post which could carry parcels at uniform rates throughout the whole of Britain. On top of this, he took a particular interest in the Bristol Water Works, a scheme to replace the old city wells.

But Francis Fry had another little interest that consumed a great deal of his time while he assumed the factory was running along nicely: he wanted to create a definitive history of the Bible, nothing less than ‘a systematic and historical account of the various editions of the different translators’. His profound conviction that the ‘Sacred Scriptures were of Divine origin and he was unravelling the wishes of the Lord’ necessitated extensive trips abroad retracing the footsteps of great Protestant scholars such as William Tyndale. In the early sixteenth century Tyndale was the first to translate much of the Bible into English directly from original Hebrew and Greek texts. He encountered so much opposition that he was forced to flee to Europe, where he was betrayed in 1535 and burned at the stake the following year.

Fry’s passion for William Tyndale ‘amounted almost to veneration’, wrote his son and biographer Theodore. He viewed him as one of the ‘greatest men England ever produced’, and was determined to make an exact copy of the Tyndale testament of 1525–26, the first English Bible. In 1867, the year Cocoa Essence was advertised on London omnibuses and the Cadbury name was emblazoned all over London, Francis Fry was absorbed in publishing a treatise on the Tyndale testament. Not content with this, he also tried to track down the original Bible translations of Thomas Cranmer, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. Three years after the martyrdom of Tyndale, Henry VIII had authorised an English translation to be distributed to every church in the land, so that anyone could hear the word of God.

Little by little, Francis Fry’s real world was reduced to a shadowy decade in the sixteenth century, entwined in the internal problems of the Tudor court. His factory, the great chocolate citadel in Bristol, was a faded dream compared to his glorious quest to find the chalice, the authentic word of God. While he was so intensely preoccupied, it was hard for him to pay more than fleeting attention to the modern-ising force being pioneered by Cadbury.

At Bridge Street, Richard and George Cadbury were beginning to find their wilderness years were behind them. The first signs, reported Thomas Little in the packing room, came from a traveller in the Black Country: ‘The weight of the goods had broken the springs of his van, and he had had to run it into a customer’s cart house for repair and ride home on a horse.’ This was one of many clues that the company was turning the corner. Skilful use of technology and advertising were winning customers. And once the Cadbury brothers knew what they were doing, the ideas kept coming. Records for the Birmingham patent office show that on 3 November 1869 they sealed a patent for one of the first kinds of chocolate biscuit – ‘a new improved description of biscuit manufactured from the cocoa bean’ – and the search was on for other new forms of luxury foods.

All this was not enough for George. Seizing the initiative from his rivals, he went on the offensive to promote Cadbury’s pure new cocoa. Aware of the public’s growing sensitivity to food adulteration, he lobbied the government to take action. People should know what they were buying, he argued. Eventually he was summoned to a government committee to give evidence. In a troubling move for his competitors, he insisted that only an absolutely pure product such as Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence should be called ‘cocoa’. All preparations mixed with additional ingredients should be sold under a different name.