Chocolate Wars. By Deborah Cadbury, HarperPress, 340 pages, £20

When the food giant Kraft Foods mounted its hostile takeover of Cadbury in late 2009, not everyone understood the ensuing fuss. In a nutshell, the government was powerless in the face of an international business deal backed by investors whose goal was short-term profit.

Within a few weeks, a company that had taken 186 years to build had been abandoned to the corporate world.

By the early 19th century nearly 4,000 Quakers were running English banks and companies. Governed by their own strict standards, the Quakers believed that wealth creation should fund social projects, that reckless debt was shameful and that the quality of the product was paramount.

When Richard and George Cadbury inherited their father's small chocolate drink business in Birmingham in 1861, it was haemorrhaging money. Running down their inheritances to keep the company afloat, they survived on bread and butter suppers — yet provided excursions, education, clubs and improved wages for their employees and set their eyes on the future.

Taking a gamble, the Cadbury brothers invested in a new machine from their Dutch competitors, Van Houten. It paid off. Producing highly refined chocolate powders, the Dutch press allowed Cadbury to exploit growing fears about food adulteration and, overcoming their scepticism about advertising, they printed posters for newspapers, shops and even omnibuses. The brothers' capital was gone but their company had turned the corner.

A food revolution

The historian Deborah Cadbury — a distant cousin — is very good at describing the intense competition between chocolate producers. In Switzerland, Lindt's new grinding technique produced a silky chocolate fondant, while Nestle overcame the difficulties of mixing the water in milk with the fats in cocoa to produce the world's first milk chocolate.

The American Milton Hershey was turning away from sweets and caramels towards a chocolate product that would take America by storm.

Recognising that they were on the brink of a food revolution, in the 1880s, Cadbury spread to Australia, the West Indies, the Middle East and South East Asia. The profits meant they could implement their vision for social reform.

In the decade to 1900, cocoa consumption doubled and the price of beans fell as new plantations were established in the Gulf of Guinea. Cadbury was thriving, yet the Quaker brothers' religious convictions still unified every aspect of their lives.

Championing the needs of working people through the emerging labour movement, an ageing George anguished over reports of slavery in the African plantations and took the lead in an English boycott of beans from Portuguese San Tomé and Princípe.

The company's success was assured with the launch of Dairy Milk in 1905, Bournville drinking chocolate in 1906 and Milk Tray nine years later. Forrest Mars was only a few years away from inventing his own successful bar. Then, in 1919, Fry merged with Cadbury: the first of a series of amalgamations necessary to safeguard their survival in an increasingly saturated market.

What emerges from Deborah Cadbury's vibrant history is the growing importance of advertising, the birth of brands and the impact of the financial markets' appetite for profit over national interest or social welfare.

Most poignant is her portrait of an impressive pair of brothers and her illustration of the loss of a particular ethic embodied by Quaker capitalists. Engaging and scholarly, Chocolate Wars is less a family biography than an impressively thought-provoking parable for our times.

 

Kate Colquhoun's next book, Mr Briggs' Hat, will be published by Little, Brown in May.