Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry

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Deborah Cadbury. Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry

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Chocolate Wars

From Cadbury to Kraft – 200 Years of

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Today, among the gleaming black façades of City office blocks, there is little to give away Mincing Lane’s colourful past. The only hint of its nineteenth-century purpose survives in the name of a building halfway down the street: Plantation House. But when John Cadbury visited in the 1820s, it was a teeming market where colonial brokers met to trade in commodities from Britain’s growing empire. There were sale rooms where frenetic auctions were taking place for tea, sugar, coffee, jute, gums, waxes, vegetable oils, spices and cocoa. Prices and details of business were written on a blackboard, and samples of goods from warehouses in the docks along the nearby Thames were on display. They included the cocoa bean, or ‘nib’, from South America, which looked like a huge chocolate-coloured almond, still dusted with the dried pulp that surrounded it in the cocoa pod, and baked by the tropical sun.

At a time when cocoa was purchased primarily to produce a novelty drink for the rich, John’s mission was to ascertain whether there might be a future in this unpromising black bean.

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