‘How do you eat yours?’ So goes Cadbury’s resurrected slogan for Creme Eggs, coinciding with the 200-year anniversary of the iconic chocolate maker.
Granted, the slogan refers to its popular Easter treat, but applies to the brand’s other products too.
The classic debate is whether chocolate belongs in the fridge or not, something that I couldn’t get an absolute answer on.
‘We’ve done some work on this,’ says Adam Harris, who has the title of wellbeing chocolate technology platforms lead at Cadbury.
How do you eat yours? Cadbury produces around 500million Creme Eggs every year
Long lasting: Launched in 1938, Cadbury still makes its Roses chocolate tins
‘Half of consumers say they love the chocolate straight out the fridge, half want it at room temperature. It’s very much personal preference.’
If you want his two cents, it’s in the fridge during summer and at room temperature during winter.
Not a definitive answer to the debate, but it’s the best I can get him to commit to on my visit to Bourneville, Birmingham, where Cadbury – one of Britain’s most successful ever export stories – is based.
It would be fair to say that for many people, it is a bar of Cadbury that they think of in this debate, whether they imagine it in the fridge or not.
Having now been making chocolate for two centuries, the iconic purple packaging has become an staple in households across the country and is pervasive in the daily lives of millions – a celebration in good times and a comfort in bad.
For Cadbury though, this is an important part of its marketing, as well as its relationship with its consumer base.
Louise Stigant, Cadbury’s UK managing director, told me: ‘There are the big moments like Christmas and Easter, but there are also those moments of getting a good school report, and maybe mum has bought you a Freddo.
‘I think that’s where it is part of people’s rituals with the most important people in their lives; their family and their friends. I think that builds a love [for the brand].’
Unsurprisingly, the brand is also something that many feel protective over.
After Cadbury was taken over by Kraft in 2010 amid considerable pushback in the UK, including from the Government, rumours abounded that the Dairy Milk recipe had been changed – an accusation that many still level towards the chocolate maker.
For what it’s worth, Cadbury maintains that it hasn’t altered the make-up of the beloved bar.
But with so much heritage behind Cadbury, and a devoted following for its products, creating new products and dispensing with old ones isn’t a simple process.
Stigant added: ‘The balance when we think about innovation is holding on to the heritage and the love of the products that people really recognise, and then bringing some new and exciting innovation to their to their shopping baskets’
‘Cadbury has spent 200 years building the brand in a way that people find it very close to their hearts.’
And while they are indeed keen to look backwards, having opened a brand-new archival department to celebrate the anniversary, the businesses is also set on continuing its innovation and development.
Sarah Foden, archive manager at Cadbury, said: ‘There’s a quote about an archivist always having one eye on the future and not on the past, because it’s always about how the things from today are going to be of value in the future for people looking back.’
The archives are indeed impressive, and a treasure trove for any history lover. For those more eating-inclined, however, the future is bright – and covered in chocolate.
The bars of the past: Cadbury products and packaging designs have changed over the years
Over the past decade and a half, Cadbury’s parent company Mondelez has invested £275million into Cadbury’s UK operations, including expanding its research and development team to 600 staff across its sites in Bourneville and Reading.
Cadbury said all of its chocolate bars made and sold in 150 countries begin development in its global R&D centre located in its Bourneville factory.
Adam Harris works out of a scaled-up domestic kitchen, filled with ingredients and equipment that allow him and other R&D staff to experiment with new product ideas.
He said: ‘We use lots of different routes of inspiration. So the cooking world is obviously a great place to start.
‘But we look further out. We look at consumer trends, what is going on in the world, what is happening in the fashion world, what is happening in the motor industry. It will all influence consumers lifestyles.’
He said, ‘That’s why we keep going back to the consumers. If the consumers say they don’t like it, we’re not going to launch it, because we’ve got to make sure they’re happy, and they have expectations that these products taste great.’
But tastes change, Harris says, and the products Cadbury produces need to evolve with them.
It’s true, having glanced through the Cadbury archives, I’m not sure how many consumers would be keen on a Cadbury Marzipan Tray or, indeed, a Cadbury Pineapple bar.
‘One of my favourite products was Cadbury Snaps, it was a curved chocolate, a bit like a chocolate Pringle… but in that instance it didn’t meet consume needs, so we took it off the market,’ Harris told This is Money.
‘A product for today might not meet the needs for the future. That’s why we’re constantly innovating. Consumers want new opportunities, new taste, new textures and new flavors.
One such development is Cadbury’s newly launched Dairy Milk & More range, consisting of ‘Caramel Nut Crunch’ and ‘Nutty Praline Crisp’.
Innovation: Adam Harris says consumer tastes are constantly changing, meaning that the R&D department must find new ways to use their ingredients
The reason for their existence? ‘The younger consumers want to have multi-sensorial eat journeys. The product has multiple textures in it, making it a different eat to a bar of Dairy Milk.’
The innovation process doesn’t just consist of Harris and his colleagues playing around with ingredients in a kitchen, however.
The R&D department at Bourneville has its own pilot plant that it uses to carry out test runs of new products.
‘We do everything from you know what you do in your kitchen at home, through to manufacture.
‘And each step we have to understand what the changes are, obviously as you scale things up there is an impact on the way the product is made,’ Harris said.
‘In the pilot plant, we have everything from lab bench level to almost equivalent to what’s in the factory.’
This allows the innovation team to check whether its ideas can work on an almost industrial scale, proving that it can be translated to the factory proper.
Unsurprisingly, the factory dwarfs the single pilot line, with 23 lines in total.
Community focus: Cadbury says its home is in Bourneville, where it has been located since 1879
How Cadbury has a community focus
While the Bourneville complex is by no means small, it is somewhat still surprising that Cadbury has remained on the same site since it was built in 1879, instead of moving like so many other firms do.
The brand didn’t start in Bourneville of course, with John Cadbury, a Quaker, initially founded a grocer’s shop in Bull Street, in central Birmingham. It was his sons, George and Richard who decided to relocate the company away from the industrial heart of the city to its current site in Bourneville.
‘The home of Cadbury is Bourneville,’ Foden tells me: ‘Location wise, it is really important to us to be here and to be on this wider sort of campus.’
Indeed, Cadbury says community is at the heart of the brand. The Bourneville village that surrounds the campus was, after all, built alongside the factory to house its workers.
Cadbury is still active in the surrounding area through the Cadbury Foundation, which invests in local community projects and charities.
‘If you were to go back sort of 15 years, the cost of making chocolate here in Bournville was much more expensive than average in Europe,’ Stigant said, ‘therefore, the investment [from Mondelez] was important to secure manufacturing in the Bournville site, and that’s allowed us to drive efficiency and make sure that we can compete with other chocolate manufacturers.’
While marking 200 years of the brand is something that has been highly celebrated by Cadbury, its focus very much remains on the future, and on innovation.
‘It’s really important that this plant, this business, is in really good shape to last another 200 years and be there for future families to enjoy Cadbury,’ Stigant said.
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