Cadbury is the chocolate of British childhood. Dairy Milk is the country’s best-selling chocolate bar, the purple wrapper is one of the most recognised pieces of packaging in Britain, and the company’s Christmas and Easter products are fixtures of the calendar.
The Quaker beginning
John Cadbury opened a shop in Birmingham in 1824 selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate. He was a Quaker, and Quakers were both barred from universities and the professions — which pushed many into business — and firmly opposed to alcohol. Cocoa was promoted explicitly as a wholesome alternative to gin and beer.
Several of the great British chocolate firms share this origin: Cadbury, Fry’s and Rowntree’s were all Quaker companies, and the overlap between chocolate and nonconformist temperance campaigning is one of the odder facts of British industrial history.
Bournville
In the 1890s George and Richard Cadbury moved the factory out of the Birmingham slums to a green site they named Bournville, and built a model village around it: good-quality cottages with gardens, parks, sports grounds, schools and a swimming pool, sold and let to workers at fair rents.
There was deliberately no pub, and to this day alcohol is not sold in Bournville village. The Cadburys also introduced half-day Saturdays, pension schemes and works medical care decades before they were common, and the village is still administered by a trust.
Bournville is also the name of their dark chocolate bar, which is why a British dark chocolate is named after a Birmingham suburb.
Dairy Milk
Launched in 1905, and built around having more milk in it than any competitor — the “glass and a half of full cream milk in every half pound” slogan ran for the better part of a century, and the tilting glasses are still on the wrapper.
British Dairy Milk tastes distinctly different from American Cadbury, which is manufactured under licence by Hershey and uses a different recipe. British visitors to America find it unrecognisable and say so at length; the reverse is also true.
Creme Eggs
The Easter product that arrives in shops in early January, to the usual complaints. A chocolate shell filled with a white and yellow fondant imitating a yolk, and around 200 million are made each year at Bournville.
The 2015 decision to change the shell from Dairy Milk to a cheaper standard cocoa mix produced genuine national anger, sustained press coverage and a measurable fall in sales. It remains the standard example cited whenever a British brand is accused of quietly cheapening a recipe.
The takeover
Cadbury was bought by the American food giant Kraft in 2010 after a hostile bid, despite substantial public and political opposition. Kraft promised to keep the Somerdale factory near Bristol open, then closed it within weeks of completing the deal — a reversal that led to a parliamentary inquiry and a formal reprimand from the Takeover Panel.
The brand is now owned by Mondelez. Production continues at Bournville, but a good deal of British affection for Cadbury is now tinged with a sense of something having been sold off, and the recipe arguments are never entirely separate from that.