I promise not to turn this into a “Kat summarizes random episodes from history (without citing any sources - this isn’t investigative journalism!)” blog, unless this blows up and I become the new Substack viral sensation (lol). Will anyone enjoy this even a quarter as much as I enjoyed researching it?! Probably not, but I do hope some of you are drawn in by this tale. — xo, Kat
As I mentioned last week, this all started innocently enough, with a friend’s post on Facebook about the wrappers in her tin of Quality Street chocolates. Before I knew it, I was researching the history of British chocolates, sliding down a deeper, more chocolatey rabbit hole than I could have imagined.
A rabbit hole filled with Quakers.
As it turns out, there were three great chocolate families in early 19th century England. The Cadburys of Birmingham, the Rowntrees of York, and the Frys of Bristol. Of course, there were other chocolatiers at the time. Cocoa was still a new product (sold exclusively as a drink, but more on that later), one that everyone could see the potential of, but hadn’t yet figured out how to fully exploit. Enter, the Quakers.
Quakers at the time were barred from universities, and from politics and law. Many turned to commerce, though they adhered to a strict ethical code based on simplicity, integrity and community. They practiced a form of “Quaker capitalism” that valued hard work and an insistence that wealth be distributed for the benefit of workers and community, rather than accumulated for profit by business owners. They were especially known for the decent treatment of their workers.
Rowntree founded the village of New Earswick for low income families, and provided education for both children and adults. His son undertook a seminal study of poverty in York and played an important role in the establishment of the public library there.
The Cadburys' factory village of Bournville, in Birmingham, included homes for all their workers, as well as medical facilities, a canteen, recreational facilities and community gardens. Figures from 1915 showed that infant mortality in Bournville was much lower than for Birmingham as a whole, when compared over five years. Bournville was the model community that inspired the Cadburys’ American rival Milton Hershey to create his own utopian town in Pennsylvania.
If you were to google “who first introduced the five-day work week,” you might find a Wikipedia article claiming that Henry Ford did so in 1926. And yet (at least according to the Candy Hall of Fame1, it seems that the Cadburys were already quietly doing it in the late 1800s.
In 1855, patriarch John Cadbury had just lost his beloved wife to Tuberculosis and lost all interest in running the family’s chocolate business. Without his leadership, the factory floundered, until two of his sons, George and Richard, took over. Investing all the money they inherited after their mother’s death, the brothers tried to make a name for themselves in chocolate. It was tough going for years. They faced stiff competition from others such as the Terry company (yes, those Terrys! Though they didn’t invent the chocolate orange till 1932). It was a fast-growing market, and some of the new innovations the Cadbury brothers launched to market (like “Iceland Moss,” a literal mix of cocoa and lichen) failed to attract customers. Their most notable competitor was another Quaker firm, Fry and Sons, at the time the largest cocoa works in the world. So large, that it was shaping the growth of the city of Bristol.
In 1847, Fry and Sons introduced an intriguing new product onto the market. They had found a way to blend cocoa powder and its by-product, cocoa fat, with sugar in order to make a rich paste, which was pressed into a mold and left to harden. The result: the first-ever “chocolate for eating.” A chocolate bar, in a world of cocoa drinks. The breakthrough would obviously change the chocolate industry forever, though it might have been hard to believe at the time. Fry’s early prototypes were rock hard, and not particularly sweet. The “Chocolat Delicieux a Manger,” as the Frys called it, wasn’t a huge seller. But the savvy Fry brothers had caught a glimpse of a future of solid chocolate that could be produced in bulk.
George Cadbury noticed these innovations too, of course. But, he and his brother couldn’t afford the complex mold-making machinery required to mass-produce solid chocolate. Instead, George gambled on something even more radical.
Have you ever read a cake recipe that calls for specifically “Dutch process” cocoa powder? Well, that process was invented in the 1800s by Coenraad van Houten, and was the absolute gold standard of cocoa at the time. It still is. It was so popular, that even British shops were starting to import it instead of selling local product. George Cadbury gathered the last of his inheritance and went to Holland to learn from Van Houten and try to acquire one of his machines.
The process, by the way, is this: the usual methods of boiling and skimming the cacao bean resulted in an indigestible cocoa that was over 50% cocoa butter. Van Houten perfected a hydraulic press that reduced the fat to less than 30%. The result: a pure, smooth drink that tasted more like chocolate than the potato flour that was commonly mixed in to help bind the powder and fat and prevent it from clumping. George Cadbury went home with the Dutch process machine, and soon, the brothers were experimenting with a new form of edible chocolate that was sweeter and smoother than Fry’s early experiments.
In 1869, Cadbury launched a product so un-Quaker-like in its extravagance that their father must have been turning in his grave at the mere thought. It was called the “Fancy Box,” a selection of sweets filled with fruit creams, nuts, marzipan and spices, that brought the exotic qualities of the French chocolatiers to the British public.
My beloved Dairy Milk bar would take another three decades to come to market, but the Cadburys’ fortunes were starting to turn. Invented by George’s son, George Cadbury Jr, the Dairy Milk bar had more milk in it than anything else on the market. Early ads boasted that a cup and a half of “full-cream milk” was used for each 1/2lb slab of chocolate.
* Note the claim above that it comes from “the Factory in a Garden,” a reference to the idyllic Cadbury-built village of Bournville.
By 1918, Cadbury and Fry merged, and although Rowntree was invited to participate in the merger, the company declined to do so - perhaps setting into motion the events that would, seventy years later, find all of the original British chocolate brands in the hands of foreign conglomerates.
But, back in the early 1900s, long before any of those worries reared their heads, these giants of chocolate were thriving, and busy inventing the candies that still dominate the chocolate landscape today. Fry created Chocolate Creams and Crunchie bars, Rowntree invented Kit Kat, Aero and Smarties (these Smarties, not these ones, which as every Canadian knows, are actually called Rockets), while Cadbury was coming up with Flake and Creme Eggs.
In 1969, Rowntree merged with Mackintosh2 (the king of toffee!) and entered into a partnership with Hershey to distribute their chocolates in North America, and rejected a takeover bid from General Foods. But that wasn’t the end of the bids from foreign companies.
By 1988, Nestlé was showing interest in Rowntree. Discussions were friendly at first, but quickly turned hostile, and the company was bought up in a controversial move, as Nestlé was prevented from making similar acquisitions at home, thanks to Swiss anti-competition laws.
Remember how General Foods wanted to buy Rowntree? Well, they later merged into Kraft, and ended up buying Cadbury. The multi-billion-dollar-food-companies world is a small one.
The takeover of Cadbury in 2010 was one of the largest acquisitions in British history, and one of the most contested. In an ironic twist, British laws (similar to the Swiss ones) had prevented Cadbury from purchasing Rowntree a few years before the Nestlé kerfuffle, a merger that might have kept both companies out of foreign hands by making them larger and harder to acquire, but instead helped pave the way for both takeovers.
It’s kind of a sad ending to an interesting story. Unfettered capitalism is the winner, and my beloved childhood chocolates are owned by the likes of Kraft and Nestlé. I don’t know much about Kraft (one too many rabbit holes to go down), but Nestlé is of course famous for their child labour, environmental abuses, price fixing, the unethical promotion of baby formula in developing countries (are you old enough to remember that ‘90s boycott?), their desire to privatize all the world’s water3, and the like?
Rather than end on a downer, I’ll end this on a random but charming note. The only thing I thought Quakers were famous for before embarking on this research, is oats. But, it turns out that Quaker Oats has nothing to do with Quakers. The men who founded that company back in 1877 read about Quakers (supposedly in an Encyclopedia) and thought that the Quaker values of integrity, honesty, and so on, seemed like good ones for customers to associate with their product. It was all just marketing.
However, Quaker Oats does have one wild connection to the world of chocolate! The company financed the (absolutely bananas, but quite great) 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring meme-king Gene Wilder. In return, Quaker Oats got the license to produce many of the candy bars named in the film. Alas, the film was a flop until about a decade after its release, when it became hugely popular thanks to home video sales and repeated airings on TV. I took my kid to see it when Cineplex played it theatrically earlier this year (in anticipation of the Christmas release of Wonka), and I can report that it holds up very well.
The Candy Hall Of Fame is a real thing! A 50 year old institution, administered by the even older National Confectionery Sales Association (NCSA), formed in 1899.
Macintosh was not a Quaker company, but they are the ones who invented Quality Street, which is what started me down this garden path.
Former Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe reached cartoon-villain status when made some statements in the 2005 documentary We Feed the World about what he called the “extreme view” that all human beings should have a right to water. His remarks were so poorly received by the world-at-large that Nestlé still has a page on their site backtracking about it.