Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (10 page)

The recipe proved to be a success, and within a few years it was brilliantly reformulated as a new type of chocolate bar. The chocolate for these “morsels of delight” according to Fry’s literature, was formed into a thin, light paste. The mint cream was set in hundreds of tiny molds and taken to covering rooms, where “scores of young damsels” with chocolate trays coated the batches. In 1866 the first wagonloads of Fry’s Chocolate Cream found their way throughout Britain to the grocers and sweetshops. Preliminary sales of Fry’s minty chocolate sensation may have been modest, but there was growing interest—and not just from customers.

French chocolatiers, who had long held a reputation for exquisite handmade confections, were also exploring ways to produce them in
bulk. Just outside Paris at his chocolate works on the River Marne in Noisiel, Emile Menier hit upon a process not dissimilar to Fry’s. He inherited his business from his father, a chemist, who had originally used cocoa sweetened with sugar as a coating for his pills. Emile developed the cocoa side of his father’s business and by the mid-nineteenth century, he had created a method for pressing dark chocolate into a mold. Wrapped in chrome yellow paper, it was the first solid chocolate bar made in France, and it proved so successful that Menier’s output quadrupled in ten years, reaching 2,500 tonnes in the mid-1860s, a quarter of the country’s total output. Emile was able to invest more funds in his factory at Noisiel. Originally powered by a humble water mill, the factory was now equipped with shining new steam turbines, creating such a splendid spectacle that the locals called it “the cathedral.” Much of Menier’s chocolate was exported, and like many Europeans, he had his eye on the dense populations in Britain’s industrial towns. Soon he was in a position to open a factory of his own on Southwark Street in London.

To improve the texture of his chocolate and increase his production, Menier needed extra cocoa butter, the fatty part of the bean. He found a ready supplier in Holland—in Weesp, near Amsterdam, where a cocoa-making family firm was run by Coenraad van Houten. Somehow the Van Houtens had managed to solve a problem that had eluded everyone else: how to mechanize the separation of the fat content from the rest of the cocoa bean. As a result, his cocoa was purer and more refined than anything else on the market, and he had cocoa butter, as a by-product, for sale. Exactly how he achieved this was a trade secret, but there was no secret about his sales. Van Houten had agents building up a sales list in London; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Dublin, Ireland.

A regular traveller to London, George Cadbury could not fail to notice the new products: a purer form of cocoa made by the Dutch and eating chocolate manufactured as solid bars in bulk. In the 1860s, sales of eating chocolate were modest—nothing compared to the established drinking cocoa brands in England. Even so, like a flag planted on new territory beating against the wind, it pointed the way to unlock the potential hidden inside the little chocolate bean.

George was at a loss. He recognized that the Fry family was better placed than anyone else in Britain to take on the foreign competition. Although none of their cocoas matched the quality of Van Houten’s pure Dutch cocoa, Fry of Bristol was the cocoa metropolis of the world. Their four factories on Union Street, towering eight stories high, seemed as secure as their granite and concrete exteriors. Just as their towering citadel dominated the town, so the bounty within dominated the market. The variety and sheer abundance of Fry’s chocolate temptations put them in a class of their own. They were indeed a beacon, a light to follow.

T
he Cadbury brothers did not have the money to invest in the molding machinery that would mass-produce such luxurious temptations as a chocolate bar. Their inability to produce a popular product and make a profit was becoming critical. With no significant funds for investment, Richard and George struggled on producing cocoa as a drink mixed with the questionable starches to absorb the fat. Their new products, Iceland Moss, Pearl Cocoa, Breakfast Cocoa, and others, had failed to make an impact, and their losses continued to mount.

In response to yet another grim stocktaking, it fell to Richard to tackle overdue accounts. “We made the lowest class of goods,” George wrote later, and consequently they had some of the “least desirable custom” who were not always ready or willing to settle their debts. “The small shopkeepers were constantly failing,” he continued. Some went under without paying—putting Cadbury at risk of going under as well.

The brothers had resolved, whatever happened, not to take on any liabilities that they could not meet and not to turn to their father for additional funds. In Victorian tradition, their only sister, Maria, now in her thirties, had postponed any thoughts of marriage to devote herself to caring for their father. The oldest brother, John, after a brief attempt at farming in the West Country, had made the bold decision to immigrate to Australia. He sailed from the East India Docks
in London on December 17, 1863, on the ninety-day journey for Brisbane. Their younger brother Edward was embarking on a home-decorating business and the youngest, Henry, was still in his final years at school.

Richard and George determined that rather than assume the risk of taking on a debt, they would shut the business if they spent their entire inheritance. They continued to work relentlessly, spending long days on the road selling their cocoas to reluctant grocers and returning to the warehouse to pack the orders themselves if hands were short. The shortage of money was proving a strain at home. Richard’s oldest son, Barrow, later recalled an outing when the family had gone to Pebble Mill. His mother, Elizabeth, suddenly felt unwell, but both his parents elected “to tramp all the way back again when his father would have given so much, had he been able, to take her home in a cab.”

Unfortunately, the brothers’ industry and virtue made no difference. At the end of four years, they were facing disaster. “All my brother’s money had disappeared,” George admitted. “I had but 1,500 left—not having married.” There were insufficient funds left in their inheritance to develop a business desperate for capital. George knew the enterprise was dying for want of mechanization but they dared not risk additional loss. “I was preparing to go out to the Himalayas as a tea planter,” said George. “Richard was intending to be a surveyor.”

The Cadbury business was all but dead.

George Cadbury was considering one final reckless gamble. It would consume every last penny of his inheritance. As long as he did not fall into debt or risk the great disgrace of bankruptcy, he believed it was a risk that had to be taken.

The more George learned about the Dutch manufacturer Coenraad van Houten, the more intrigued he became. Van Houten was having great success exporting his refined, defatted cocoa to Britain from his steam factory in Weesp. Dixon Hadaway told him that Van Houten’s cocoa was so popular it was on sale in regional towns like Leeds and Liverpool as well as in the capital. Gradually George began to realize that this was the model he should follow. Refined cocoa surely held the key to the future.

George discovered that the key to Van Houten’s success lay with an invention Coenraad had developed with his father, Casparus, more than thirty years earlier. The Van Houtens recognized that established methods of boiling and skimming the bean resulted in an indigestible cocoa consisting of over 50 percent cocoa butter. After experimenting with different designs of mechanical grinders and presses, they eventually perfected a hydraulic press that reduced the cocoa fat to less than 30 percent. The flour and other less appealing
extras that had been used to sop up the fat were no longer required. The result: a purer, smoother drink that tasted more like chocolate and less like potato flour.

The Dutch process was a trade secret and no one in England, not even Fry, had discovered a way to manufacture a purer cocoa. George pondered: Could this be the way to best their English rivals? Would the Dutch be prepared to sell their machine? If they had such a machine, could the brothers turn the factory around using the spare cocoa butter to create fancy chocolates like the French? Suddenly George could see a business future that made sense. Instead of using the cocoa bean to create one type of product, a fatty and adulterated cocoa, he could create two distinctly different products—pure cocoa and eating chocolate—using the most appropriate bit of the bean for each. A whole new set of possibilities opened up—if he could get hold of the machine.

“I went off to Holland without knowing a word of Dutch,” said George, “saw the manufacturer with whom I had to talk entirely by signs and the dictionary.” They were locked in discussion in Van Houten’s factory: George, plainly dressed, earnest, frustrated by the language, and absolutely sure that the odd-looking machine would save the Cadbury factory, was desperate to charm and persuade and take home the prize.

Mr. Van Houten succumbed. The defatting machine was sold to the Quaker gentleman. The records do not reveal the agreed-upon price, but it is likely that the purchase used up much of George’s remaining funds—around £1000. George made shipping arrangements to get the monstrous prize back to Bridge Street. It arrived by canal, and the sturdy cast-iron apparatus, a full ten feet tall, was hard to maneuver into position from the wharf into the chocolate works. Worse, the thing was very greedy; to make it economical, George had to feed the giant hopper with a large amount of beans. They had to find a way to increase volume, and fast.

The preparations to launch their new product were further constrained by a double tragedy in the family. In January 1866, their younger brother, twenty-two-year-old Edward, died unexpectedly after a short illness. When John, their thirty-two-year-old brother,
wrote home in May from Brisbane to express his grief at the loss, Maria was alarmed to see that his writing appeared unsteady and his letter was unsigned. Doctors in Australia confirmed that John was suffering from “colonial fever,” a form of typhus. News of John’s death on May 28 followed almost immediately.

The unexpected loss of two brothers in such quick succession made Richard and George feel their responsibilities ever more keenly. The survival of the family business rested with them. Hopes of future family prosperity depended on this last throw of the dice. In the coming months, they streamlined production of the new drink. By the autumn, Richard was ready to start designing the artwork for the packaging. At last, in the weeks before Christmas 1866, Cocoa Essence was launched.

It soon became apparent that there was a problem. Unlike competitors whose cocoa went further with the addition of cheaper ingredients, such as starch and flour, Cocoa Essence was pure and by far the most expensive cocoa drink on sale. The launch faltered. Customers were scarce. The strain on the brothers was beginning to exact a toll.

To the Frys, watching their competition from Bristol, the Cadbury brothers’ move hinted at desperation. Under the management of Francis Fry, sales reached a staggering £102,747 during 1867. Following Fry’s contract with the Navy, their workforce rose to two hundred. With the Fry name established across England, “it was an extremely hard struggle,” George Cadbury admitted. “We had ourselves to induce shopkeepers to stock our cocoa and induce the public to ask for it.” It looked as though George’s gamble had failed.

In 1867, George and Richard made one last effort, exploiting something that Quaker rivals such as the Rowntrees in York spurned on principle: advertising. Plain Quakers, like the Rowntrees, believed that the business should be built on the quality and value of their goods. Nothing else should be needed if the product was honest. Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself—abhorrent to a man of God. To Joseph Rowntree, who was proudly settled as “Master Grocer” in his shop in York, advertising seemed a slightly shabby and unprincipled enterprise, in which promotion was somehow elevated
above the quality of the product. Even though he could see that his younger brother Henry’s cocoa works at Tanner’s Moat was not taking off as hoped, nonetheless he did not consider advertising to be the answer. He dismissed it as mere “puffery”; he even objected to fancy packaging and was content to alert his customers to a new product with a restrained and dignified letter. His deeply religious sensibility was offended by the idea of hyped-up claims or exaggeration of any kind.

The Frys had similar Quaker sensibilities when it came to excessive promotion. With the confidence that comes with over a hundred and fifty years as a successful family business, Francis Fry saw little need for change. “Our early advertisements had a certain coy primness about them,” conceded Fry’s management in the company’s 1928
Bicentenary Report
. Their “venerable announcements” of their original drink in the eighteenth century, Churchman’s Chocolate, consisted of long-winded essays trying to explain why the product was unique and how to obtain it—by Penny Post or in “the hands of errand boys.” This progressed in the early nineteenth century to little homilies that advised the public on how to prepare the drink and why it was good for them. Even the language was old-fashioned, describing the firm as an apothecary. “We were full of innocent pride in that period,” wrote the management. Certainly they had nothing that would stop you in your tracks. No gorgeous girl of forthright demeanor with glossy lips and an unmistakable message in her eyes as she sipped her cocoa. Nothing to actually hit you in the eye or stimulate the taste buds: just a message, hardly readable in small typeface, telling of Churchman’s Chocolate.