BIOGRAPHY:Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft - 200 Years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry
THERE IS A pleasing moment in Deborah Cadbury’s book, like one of those bits of dialogue in an old Hollywood biopic that, as well as telling us who the character is, gives us a broad hint about what’s going to happen next (“Saul of Tarsus, you’re going to have to mend your ways”). At the 1893 World’s Fair, in Chicago, a young candy manufacturer, Milton Hershey, was mesmerised by a stall where a Dresden man was demonstrating a machine that roasted and ground cocoa beans, producing “an aromatic stream of chocolate liquor” to which flavouring and cocoa butter were added before it was set in moulds: a miniature chocolate factory. “After pondering it deeply, he turned to his cousin, Frank Snavely. ‘Frank,’ he declared, ‘I’m going to make chocolate.’ ”
Making chocolate, and making an enormous amount of money from chocolate, are what this book is about. The chocolate is mostly made by Quakers, and of those Quakers it is mostly the Cadbury family we are concerned with. But the book is also about a model of business practice that has a lot to say to us in these dark times, when we are experiencing the grievous effects of market forces let rip.
Quakers turned to business because they were banned from the universities, could not stand for parliament, faced restrictions in other professions, such as the law, and, being pacifists, could not join the armed services. As employers they tended to place a high value on social responsibility, both to their customers and to their employees.
In 1861, brothers George and Richard Cadbury decided to take on the failing chocolate factory of their father, John, who had set up the business in Birmingham about 40 years earlier. The exotic New World bean’s main use then was for an unpalatable drink whose high oil content was absorbed by such ingredients as potato flour and, in the case of less scrupulous producers, brick dust, iron filings or red lead.
George had been sent to York to learn the grocery trade, as apprentice to another Quaker, Joseph Rowntree. Rowntree’s son, also Joseph, had gone to Ireland with his father on a Quaker relief mission during the Famine, and it had been, as the author says, “a shocking lesson in the effects of poverty”.
John Cadbury was a strong campaigner against the use of workhouse boys as chimney sweeps, and an advocate of temperance in a city where gin caused widespread misery and, incredibly, one house in 30 sold liquor.
Cocoa was promoted as a cheap and nutritious alternative to alcohol, and the Frys of Bristol, also Quakers, had cornered the market. They had also, in 1847, developed Britain’s first chocolate bar. It was fairly rough, however, and a French chocolatier, Emile Menier, made a superior product by adding cocoa butter. This he got from Coenraad van Houten, who had a secret way of separating the fat content from the rest of the bean.
George Cadbury, down to his last £1,000, travelled to Holland and persuaded Van Houten to sell him a cocoa press, so that instead of a fatty, adulterated drink the Cadburys could sell two products: pure cocoa and eating chocolate. They launched their Cocoa Essence in 1866, but its high cost kept sales low, so George and Richard decided to advertise. This was disapproved of by other Quakers, who believed a business should be built on the quality and value of its goods: “Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself: abhorrent to a man of God.”
The advertising worked – “Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best” was the slogan – cocoa sales took off, and they never looked back.
But more impressive than the firm’s great commercial success was the way it looked after its staff. In 1879 the Cadbury brothers moved the factory to a six-hectare site in the country outside congested Birmingham and around it built a garden city, Bournville, for the workers.
Over the years the scheme grew and developed, with more housing, good schools, clinics, playing fields, swimming pools, churches and a village green. It was copied by Rowntrees and other employers, and used elsewhere as a town-planning model.
In the US, Milton Hershey – not a Quaker, though his mother was a Mennonite – followed suit but named his town after himself. Strangely, as with Forrest Mars, of bar fame, it seemed that an absent father was a spur to empire-building.
The thinking of George Cadbury, the overarching figure in his company’s history, was in step with the trade-union movement, at a time before the Labour Party was founded. He trebled women’s pay, shortened working hours, set up a sick-pay and pension scheme and, in 1900, disinherited his children – “great wealth is not to be desired,” he said – to set up the Bournville Village Trust.
The author, herself a descendant of those worthy confectioners, tells the long and involved story well, taking in the lessons learned from one firm by another, the industrial espionage, the intrepid search for foreign markets, the alliances and wars.
She brings the story bang up to date with the sale of Cadbury to the Kraft group earlier this year: the long haul of 180 years meeting the thirst for short-term profit.
Former chairman Dominic Cadbury, a grandson of George, said of the deal that 60 fund managers had made the decision to sell. “The hedge funds are ‘owners’ whose motivation is to see that the company disappears,” he said. Sounds familiar.
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist
