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

375 Pages·2010·4.97 MB·English

by  Deborah Cadbury

Table of Contents

Title Page
Introduction

PART I
CHAPTER 1 - A Nation of Shopkeepers
CHAPTER 2 - Food of the Gods
CHAPTER 3 - Wretched Little Victims of the Workhouses
CHAPTER 4 - They Did Not Show Us Any Mercy
CHAPTER 5 - Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best
BIRMINGHAM 1866

PART II
CHAPTER 6 - Chocolate That Could Melt in the Mouth
VEVEY, SWITZERLAND, 1870s
BERNE, SWITZERLAND, 1870S
CHAPTER 7 - Machinery Creates Wealth but Destroys Men
BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, 1870s
BRISTOL, ENGLAND, 1870S
YORK, ENGLAND, 1870S
BOURNVILLE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
CHAPTER 8 - Money Seems to Disappear Like Magic
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
DERRY CHURCH NEAR LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA
DENVER, COLORADO, AND CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
BOURNVILLE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
CHAPTER 9 - Chocolate Empires
CHAPTER 10 - I’ll Stake Everything on Chocolate!
WEESP, HOLLAND
VEVEY, SWITZERLAND
BERNE, SWITZERLAND
YORK, BRISTOL, AND BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

PART III
CHAPTER 11 - Great Wealth Is Not to Be Desired
CHAPTER 12 - A Serpentine and Malevolent Cocoa Magnate
ANGOLA, DECEMBER 1904
CHAPTER 13 - The Chocolate Man’s Utopia
DERRY CHURCH, PENNSYLVANIA
BOURNVILLE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
VEVEY, SWITZERLAND
HERSHEY, PENNSYLVANIA
CHAPTER 14 - That Monstrous Trade in Flesh and Blood
CHAPTER 15 - God Could Have Created Us Sinless
HERSHEY, PENNSYLVANIA
EUROPE 1916

PART IV
CHAPTER 16 - This Company Isn’t Big Enough for Both of Us
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 1920s
BOURNVILLE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
CHAPTER 17 - I Pray for Snickers
BOURNVILLE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
DECEMBER 7, 1941
CHAPTER 18 - American Tanks Were on the Lawn
CHAPTER 19 - The Quaker Voice Could Still Be Heard
CHAPTER 20 - They’d Sell for 20p
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, AUGUST 2009
CHAPTER 21 - Gone. And It Was So Easy.

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright Page

For my mother and Martin with love
Introduction
When I was a young child, the knowledge that a branch of my family had built a
chocolate factory filled me with wonder. What sort of charmed life did such a
possibility offer to my relatives? Each Christmas I had an insight when the most
enormous case arrived from my uncle, Michael Cadbury, containing a large
supply of mouthwatering chocolates. Even more memorable was the trip I made
in the early 1960s to see how the chocolate was made. Opening the door to the
factory at Bournville in Birmingham, I was greeted by a magical sight.
To a child’s eyes, it was as though I had entered a cavernous interior that
belonged to some benign, orderly, and highly productive wizard who had
somehow saturated the very air with a chocolate aroma. My uncle and parents
raised their voices against the whirr of machinery. But I did not hear them. All I
could see was chocolate. It was all around me in every stage of the process.
There was molten chocolate bubbling in vats towering above me, vats so huge
that they had ladders running up their sides. Chocolate rivers flowed on a
number of swiftly moving conveyers through gaps in the wall to mysterious
chambers beyond. Solid chocolate shaped in a myriad of exciting confections
travelled in neat soldierly processions towards the wrapping department. Such a
miracle of clockwork precision and sensual extravagance was hard to take in.
Even more puzzling to my young mind: How did this chocolate feast, which
brought the idea of greed to a whole new level, fit with religion? For even
though I did not yet understand the connection, I did know that the chocolate
works were in some inexplicable way intimately connected with a little-known
religious movement known as Quakerism. Was all this the hand of God?
My own father had left the Quaker movement just before the Second World
War. He wanted, as he put it, to “join the fight against Hitler,” a stance that was
not compatible with Quaker pacifism. I was brought up in the Church of
England, and as a child, when I joined my cousins for Quaker meetings, I felt as
if I were on the outside looking in on a strange, even mystical tradition. Long
silences endured in bare rooms, stripped of any sign that might excite the senses,
where grown-ups contemplated the surrounding void, were incomprehensible to
me. Equally incomprehensible: How did my rich chocolate relatives acquire that
admirable restraint, that air of wholesome frugality? Even family picnics had a