Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers Read Online Free

drinking it.
    Their father, like his rivals, followed the established convention of mixing cocoa with starchy ingredients to absorb the cocoa butter. As their business had declined, the volume of these cheaper materials had increased. “At the time we made a cocoa drink of which we were not very proud,” recalls George Cadbury. “Only one fifth of it was cocoa—the rest was potato flour or sago and treacle: a comforting gruel.”
    This “gruel” sold to the public under names that were common at the time for cocoa dealers such as Cocoa Paste, Soluble Chocolate Powder, Best Chocolate Powder, Fine Crown, Best Plain, Plain, Rock Cocoa, Penny Chocolate, or even Penny Soluble Chocolate. Customers
did not buy it in the form of a powder but as a fatty paste made into a block or cake. To make a drink at home, they chipped or flaked bits off the block into a cup and added hot water—or milk if they could afford it. It is a measure of how badly the Cadbury cocoa business was faring that three-quarters of their trade from the Bridge Street factory came from tea and coffee sales.
    Although promoted as a health drink, cocoa had a mixed reputation. Unscrupulous traders sometimes colored it with brick dust and added other questionable products not entirely without problems for the digestive system: a pigment called umber, iron filings, or even poisons like vermilion and red lead. Such dishonest dealers also found that the expensive cocoa butter could be stretched a little further with the addition of olive or almond oil or even animal fats such as veal. The unwary customer could find himself purchasing a drink that could turn rancid and was actually harmful.
    Although the prospects for the business in 1861 did not look hopeful, the alternatives for Richard and George were limited. As Quakers, higher education was not an option for them. Like all nonconformists, they were legally banned from Oxford and Cambridge, the only teaching universities in England at the time. As pacifists, Quakers could not join the armed services. Nor were they permitted to stand as members of Parliament, and they faced restrictions on other professions such as the law. As a result, many Quakers turned to the world of business, but here too the Society of Friends laid down strict guidelines.
    In a Quaker community, a struggling business was a liability. Failing to honor a business agreement or falling into debt was seen as a form of theft and punished severely. If the cocoa works went under owing money to creditors, Richard and George would face the censure of the Quaker movement or, worse, they would be disowned completely and treated as outcasts within their circle. Quite apart from these strict Quaker rules, in Victorian society business failure and bankruptcy could lead to the debtors’ prison or the dreaded poorhouse, either option raising the prospect of an early grave.
    Ahead was a battle. Defeat was all too possible. The brothers did not have to dedicate themselves to this small space, with their offices
scarcely bigger than a coffin. “It would have been far easier to start a new business, than to pull up a decayed one which had a bad name,” George admitted. “The prospect seemed a hopeless one, but we were young and full of energy.”
    To the remaining employees who now had reason to fear for their jobs, “Mr. Richard” appeared jovial, relaxed, and “always smiling,” while “Mr. George” was cut from a different cloth, “stern but very just.” His unremitting self-discipline and his ability to focus every aspect of his life on one goal became legendary. “He was not a man,” a colleague later observed, “but a purpose .” And what George and Richard decided to do next would become the stuff of family legend.

    R ichard and George Cadbury were the third generation of Cadbury tradesmen in Birmingham. It was their grandfather, Richard Tapper Cadbury, who had been instrumental in breaking centuries of long association with the West