Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (17 page)

While the House of Fry sailed blithely through the swiftly changing markets of the late-nineteenth century, and the Cadbury brothers embarked on a series of calculated risks, Joseph Rowntree in York struggled to keep his business afloat. In the 1870s his product list included all manner of delicious temptations, including Shilling Cocoa, Shield Chocolate, Chocolate Drops, the irresistible Half Penny Balls, and other more wholesome foodstuffs, such as Food for Infants and medicinal fruit salts. Yet there was nothing that had enraptured the northern palate.

Joseph Rowntree persisted in his stance against innovations such as advertising and marketing. This extended to keeping a watchful eye on shop owners who bought the right to rebrand Rowntree products. One such owner was Blanks, who relabelled Rowntree’s Homeopathic Cocoa and took the liberty of adding a couple of words to the package that might actually prompt the customer to buy it. The luckless Blanks soon heard from his supplier. “It is
not
a pure ground cocoa,” Joseph stormed. “It is
not
produced from the finest Trinidad Nuts. It is
not
the best for family use. In fact the whole thing is a sham, not very creditable to anyone concerned with it.”

Joseph Rowntree wanted his consumers to benefit from his high trading standards, but he also wanted to bring benefits to his workers. He and and his brother Henry had a reputation as fair employers, but with the business struggling in the depression of the 1870s, good intentions were not enough. Although total sales rose from £7,383 per year in 1870 to £30,890 by 1879, the average net profit
was as little as £372 a year. The years 1873 and 1876, when the company suffered losses, were particularly bad. No wonder that by the mid-1870s, Rowntree still saw himself as a Master Grocer first and cocoa manufacturer second.

As a plain Quaker, Joseph Rowntree appreciated thrift and frugality. Such parsimony without a clear vision might have driven the business into the ground, were it not for a curious visit that came out of the blue. In 1879 a French confectioner named Claude Gaget arrived in town and asked to see Rowntree. Gaget had worked for a French sweet firm, Campagnie Francaise of Paris, and adapted their recipes. He had created his own version of a new kind of sweet—a fruity, chewy pastille—that was popular in France but was not yet being made in England.

It is hard to imagine the middle-aged Joseph Rowntree, a Quaker who had proved most particularly set in his ways, with this eager young Frenchman tasting the pastilles. Perhaps it was the influence of Joseph’s younger brother, Henry, that gave the Frenchman such a favorable reception. But as Joseph ruminated on this small, colorful fruity sweet, which was unlike anything he had tasted, curling his tongue appreciatively around the slowly released flavors, he caught a glimpse of deliverance. Here was a creation that might enable him to get one up on the French
and
his Quaker rivals.

Joseph was not a man to leap into anything suddenly. With a careful eye on the budget, he supported the development of the fruit pastille in a sober and responsible manner. Investment in a boiling pot was much cheaper than investment in Van Houten’s machinery. There was room for a boiling pot or two in a corner of the factory, and money could be found for Gaget to hire an assistant. Joseph knew the French had a monopoly on pastilles and gums. If Gaget succeeded in creating a recipe that allowed him to mass-produce an expensive French speciality, he could launch a quality product at a low price. The new treat was honest and natural; just fruit and sugar. His faith in the fruity confection was boundless.

Yet after laboring over steaming cauldrons of fruit, Gaget delivered samples in 1880 that did not live up to their early promise. The
texture was not right. The flavor was less than perfect. Joseph spurned sample after sample. The quest for an original breakthrough product remained as elusive as ever.

Meanwhile at Bournville, George and Richard found themselves in the fast lane. “Orders after a time came in so fast,” observed chocolate maker Fanny Price, that the spacious new factory “at length became overcrowded.” Any misgivings that the decision to remove adulterated lines might seriously harm sales were soon put to rest. The message that Cadbury stood for quality and produced pure cocoa in wholesome conditions distinguished the brand from the rest of the market and boosted sales. The brothers advertised for staff in the local villages of Kings Norton, Stirchley, Northfield, and Selly Oak. The number of employees jumped from 230 when they left Bridge Street to more than 300 within a year.

A comparison of Fry’s and Cadbury’s sales figures during this period show just how wrong the critics were about Bournville. In 1875, Fry’s total sales were £236,075, while Cadbury’s were much smaller at £70,396, and Rowntree’s smaller still at £19,177. Five years later in 1880, Francis Fry saw his business grow to sales of £266,285. What he could not know was how fast Cadbury was catching up. That same year, Cadbury had sales figures of £117,505 and Rowntree of £44,017. In the twenty years since George and Richard had taken over from their father in 1861, they had turned a loss-making firm into one that was nearly half the size of their leading competitor.

The Cadbury brothers proved to be an unstoppable force. Richard’s oldest son, Barrow, was impressed by the collaboration between them: “No two partners ever worked in more complete harmony than the two Cadbury brothers, Richard and George,” he remarked. Material reward had not meant that the brothers abandoned their dedication to
long hours and spartan self-denial. According to family records, it had long been their custom to make a small leg of mutton last for an entire week of meals: roast on Monday, minced by Wednesday, and “using the bones and any scrap end to furnish the meal on Friday.” When their father, John, came to visit one day at Bournville, the mutton bones were bare. He delivered a gentle rebuke, pointing out that it was not acceptable fare for the young clerk who dined with them, thus ending not only “the tyranny of the leg of mutton” but also the tyranny of extreme frugality.

Four years after the move, a reporter from the
Midland Echo
made the trip out to see what the brothers had created. “In the midst of green fields, with the ripple of the brook-like Bourne on whose banks the kingfisher and the moor hen find a home, Bournville forms the central part of a natural picture as refreshing to the senses as is the cup of cocoa manufactured there,” he enthused. The reporter was impressed with the creepers and shrubs “evidently glorying in the pure air” and the “well dressed happy looking girls trooping in at the door.” He noted that each girl looks “neat and clean, as if they were out visiting, and great is their admiration for their employers.” As for the Cadbury brothers themselves, “There is so little suggestive of the factory owner about them and so many implications of benevolence and kindly feeling that one becomes irresistibly impressed with the thought that money for themselves is the last thing on their minds!”

But business growth was indeed on their minds. News of the Swiss breakthroughs was starting to reach England, prompting George and Richard to create a research department to develop new lines. To take on the French, they hired a Parisian chocolatier, Frederick Kinchelman, known to the staff as “Frederick the Frenchman,” to refine such delicacies as Nougat Dragées, Pâte Duchesse, and Avelines for the Fancy Box
.
They decided to open a shop in Paris, turning a blind eye to the expensive and exclusive address at 90 Faubourg Saint-Honoré that was far removed from their simple Quaker beginnings.

Richard and George began to think about expanding into the far-flung towns in the British Empire. The very first traveller to venture overseas was Simeon Hall, who had visited Dublin in 1873. Now, following Fry’s lead, they worked through firms of exporters to set up
sales further afield. In Canada, Edward Lusher, a local agent in Montreal, was hired to promote their goods. This was followed by a similar deal in Chile with Brace Laidlow & Co. A small sample of goods was selected to dispatch to Chile, the labels duly translated into Spanish. In early 1881, the brothers took their foreign ambitions a step further. The Frys were not yet in Australia, presenting them with an opportunity to break new ground. Instead of hiring local agents, they sent out one of their own staff. A solitary traveller, Thomas Elford Edwards, was dispatched to cover the whole of Australia and New Zealand. He was the firm’s first permanent overseas representative. His mission: to find out whether the Australians had any interest in chocolate. In July 1881, a letter arrived at Bournville bearing an Australian stamp. It was from Edwards’s office in Melbourne and gave details of his first order. For the brothers it was a triumph. The first tentative threads of a chocolate empire reaching to the other side of the world.

Before there was any clear understanding of “globalization,” they recognized that their “new and handsome factory” stood at the threshold of something big. They wrote of an “extraordinary food revolution” that would transform Western lives where manufacturing would bring “internationality in food.” For a family that just a few generations earlier had exemplified Napoleon’s “nation of shop keepers,” the Cadbury brothers stood at the brink of a much larger enterprise. “There is certainly untold pleasure in having to contend with overwhelming difficulties,” wrote George. “And I sometimes pity those who have never had to go through it. Success is infinitely sweeter after struggle.”

The success of Bournville was not lost on one impoverished entrepreneur from Pennsylvania: Milton Snavely Hershey. In 1879, the year that Richard and George Cadbury opened their “factory in a garden,” things were not going well for twenty-two-year-old Hershey, who was getting his first taste of failure.

The child of a broken marriage—a penniless father intoxicated by the pursuit of the American dream and a careworn mother who had long since tired of it—Milton straddled the gulf between his father’s wild ambitions and his mother’s strict Mennonite background by toiling at a business of his own. His shirt sleeves rolled high, his overall stained, his shoes scuffed, he labored over scalding mixes and gas jets to create confections of boiled sugar from his proudly named Spring Garden Steam Confectionery Works in Philadelphia.

“Money seems to disappear like magic,” his mother, Fanny Hershey, reported to her wealthy brothers. She and her sister, Martha Snavely, dedicated themselves to Milton’s business, working through the night wrapping the sweets, but after three hard years, Milton’s candy shop was floundering.

The venture had started in 1876, after Milton took a trip to Philadelphia with a few dollars sewn into his coat lining and a great deal
of optimism. At first he had met with success, benefiting that year from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. But despite his fashionable cards promoting his “Pure Confections by Steam,” there were three hundred confectioners in Philadelphia and competition was intense. Within a few years, Milton was forced into making humiliating appeals to his wealthy relatives on his mother’s side. The Snavely uncles were inclined to help the young entrepreneur, but just as a real prospect of success came into view, so did Milton’s estranged father, Henry Hershey.

Forgiving and full of foreboding in equal measure, Fanny stood back and let her husband rekindle his relationship with his son. Man and boy became friends at once. With spellbinding certainty, Henry, ever the dreamer, presented his latest moneymaking scheme to his son. Improbably it centered on cough drops displayed in elegant little cabinets. Milton put every cent he had into cough drops and borrowed more and then watched as Henry Hershey’s scheme failed, spectacularly.

Milton ended up giving his father several hundred dollars before Henry disappeared in disgrace—to the silver mines of Colorado and another magical dream. Burdened with more debt, over the following months, Milton and his mother were drifting towards failure. The pretty sugary sweets he made himself looked so lovely in their rows of crystal jars, but he couldn’t manage to sell enough to cover his costs.

On December 8, 1880, he begged his Snavely uncles for $600, explaining, “Otherwise I will not be able to pay my bills.” His uncles obliged, only to receive another letter from their nephew on April 28, 1881: “I am in urgent need of $500.” On December 3, Milton’s Aunt Mattie wrote and asked for $400. This was followed a month later by a letter from Milton stating somewhat charmlessly, “I must have $300 which Aunt Mattie says you are to raise and send not later than the early part of next week.” Milton Hershey pointed out that he had given his father $350. He expressed his regrets over helping his father, against his aunt’s advice: “If only I had sent father on his way . . . as Aunt Mattie told me to,” he said. The uncles once again paid up, but their goodwill was running out.