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| Cadbury Flagship Chocolate Factory - Vanity Fair Magazine - May 2015 |
Chocolate, are you a lover well I know I am and I'm sure as like myself you've eaten some type of chocolate bar from Cadbury. I was reading an article in the May 2015 issue of Vanity Fair Magazine - one of my favorite magazines - about Cadbury and I discovered that the Cadbury chocolate found on your local grocery store shelves does not come from Cadbury in the United Kingdom in fact it's not even made there. The chocolate you and I have eaten is made by Hersey right here in the U.S.
I'm not going to go into any of the details about the legal battles that have been going on between Cadbury and Hershey but if your interested please feel free to click the link under the above picture to read the article. This post is going to concentrate strictly on the history of Cadbury, so I'll start with where it all began.
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| Bull Street Shop - 1824 |
The story begins in 1824 when John Cadbury opened a grocery store on Bull Street in Birmingham England. Along with the normal items found in a grocers he also sold cocoa and drinking chocolate, which he prepared himself using a pestle and mortar.
The Cadbury manufacturing business was born in 1831, when John Cadbury decided to start producing on a commercial scale and bought a four-story warehouse in nearby Crooked Lane, where a variety of cocoa and drinking chocolates were made and sold primarily to the wealthy because of the high cost of production.
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| 1847 Bridge Street Location - Cadbury |
In 1847 John Cadbury along with his brother and partner Benjamin moved their booming business into a new, larger factory in Bridge Street in the center of Birmingham. The new site had its own private canal spur, which linked the factory to the Birmingham Navigation Canal and from there to all the major ports in Britain.
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| A Typical Bournville House & Garden - Cadbury |
Fast forward to 1861, John Cadbury retires and turns the business over to his sons Richard and George - who were 25 and 21 at the time. As happens with any successful business eventually the Bridge St location became to small at which time the brothers came up with what I think was an amazing idea, they decided to find enough land outside the city to not only build the new factory but also cottages and gardens for their workers to live in and enjoy.
A statement made by George Cadbury "No man ought to be condemned to live in a place where a rose cannot grow" says a lot about his caricature, hence the Garden City of Bournville was born, the flagship factory - shown at the beginning of this post - sit there today.
Cadbury has a long history of which I have barely touched on in this post - I'd have to write at least four more pages to cover everything - below I've listed several more dates that had interesting information. If you'd like to read the complete history click the following link to Cadbury's web-site, where you'll find "The Story".
- 1897 - Cadbury Milk Chocolate is launched
- 1905 - First Cadbury Logo is commissioned
- 1920 - Cadbury Dairy Milk started out in pale mauve with red script, became purple and gold
- 1955 - Cadbury's first Tv ad premiered
- 1969 - Cadbury merges with Schweppes
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| Cadbury's Curly Wurly Bar |
The last thing I'd like to write about is the launch of the Curly Wurly bar in 1970, it was chewy caramel covered in milk chocolate. Now I've never had one of these, so why write about it well, in doing the research for this post I came across this product and remembered an episode of "The Vicar of Dibley" - which happens to be one of our all time favorite British comedies - where the victor is trying to win a contest by writing an essay entitled "Why I Love Curly Wurly's".
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