Читать книгу Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry - Deborah Cadbury, Deborah Cadbury - Страница 5

Introduction

When I was a young child, the knowledge that a branch of my family had built a chocolate factory filled me with wonder. What sort of charmed life did such a possibility offer to my relatives? Each Christmas I had an insight when the most enormous case arrived from my uncle, Michael Cadbury, containing a large supply of mouth-watering chocolates. Even more memorable was the trip I made in the early 1960s to see how the chocolate was made. As I opened the door to the factory at Bournville in Birmingham, the sight that greeted me was magical.

To my child’s eyes it was as though I had entered a cavernous interior that belonged to some benign, orderly and highly productive wizard who had somehow saturated the very air with a chocolate aroma. My uncle and parents raised their voices against the whirr of machinery. But I did not hear them. All I could see was chocolate. It was all around me, in every stage of the manufacturing process. There was molten chocolate bubbling in vats towering above me, vats so huge that they had ladders running up their sides. Chocolate rivers flowed on a number of swiftly-moving conveyers through gaps in the wall to mysterious chambers beyond. Solid chocolate shaped in a myriad of exciting confections travelled in neat, soldierly processions towards the wrapping department. Such a miracle of clockwork precision and sensual extravagance was hard to take in. Even more puzzling to my young mind was the question of how this chocolate feast, which brought the idea of greed to a whole new level, fitted with religion? For even though I did not yet understand the connection, I did know that the chocolate works were, in some inexplicable way, intimately connected with a religious movement known as Quakerism. Was all this the hand of God?

My own father had left the Quakers just before the Second World War. He wanted, as he put it, to ‘join the fight against Hitler’, a stance that was not compatible with Quaker pacifism. I was brought up in the Church of England, and as a child, when I joined my cousins for Quaker meetings, I felt as if I were on the outside looking in on a strange, even mystical tradition. Long silences endured in bare rooms, stripped of anything that might excite the senses, where grownups contemplated the surrounding void, were incomprehensible to me. Equally incomprehensible: how did my rich, chocolate relatives acquire that admirable restraint, that air of wholesome frugality? Even family picnics had a way of turning into long and chilly route marches, raindrops trickling down my back. The wealth and the austerity seemed oddly incongruous. Did the one contribute to the other? Cheerful homilies from my father along the lines of ‘Many a mickle makes a muckle’ and ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’ did not supply a satisfactory answer. Even a five-year-old knew this was not the key to creating a chocolate factory.

A generation passed before I decided to retrace my steps up Bournville Lane. This time it was personal. I wanted to delve into the Bournville and family archives to uncover the whole story. When I turned the corner in the lane in the autumn of 2007, my heart skipped a beat as I was taken back to that day when my father and uncle, both now much missed, had taken me round the factory. To my surprise, the chocolate works seemed even larger than I remembered. Imposing red-brick blocks stood beside the neatly mowed cricket pitch, with Bournville village and green nestled behind. At this time, Cadbury was the largest confectioner in the world, and the only independent British chocolate enterprise to survive from the nineteenth century. I wanted to understand the journey that took my deeply religious Quaker forebears from peddling tins of cocoa from a pony and trap around Birmingham to this mighty company that reached around the globe.

The story began five generations ago, when the far-sighted Richard Tapper Cadbury, a draper in Birmingham in the early nineteenth century, sent his youngest son, John, to London to study a new tropical commodity that was attracting interest among the colonial brokers of Mincing Lane: cocoa. Was it something to eat or drink? Richard Tapper saw it pre-eminently as a nutritious non-alcoholic drink in a world that relied on gin to wash away its troubles. Never could my abstemiously inclined ancestor have guessed what fortunes would be entwined with the humble cocoa bean, although it seemed full of promise, a touch of the exotic.

His grandsons, George and Richard Cadbury, turned a struggling business into a chocolate empire in one generation. In the process, they found themselves in competition with their Quaker friends and rivals Joseph Rowntree in York, and Francis Fry and his nephew Joseph in Bristol. The Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree dynasties were built on values that form a striking contrast with business ethics today. Their approach to the creation of wealth was governed by a code of practice developed over hundreds of years since the English Civil War by their Quaker elders and set out at yearly meetings and in Quaker books of discipline. This nineteenth-century ‘Quaker capitalism’ was far removed from the excesses of the world’s recent financial crisis, with business leaders apparently seeing no harm in pocketing huge personal profits while their companies collapsed.

For the Quaker capitalists of the nineteenth century, the idea that wealth-creation was for personal gain only would have been offensive. Wealth-creation was for the benefit of the workers, the local community and society at large, as well as for the entrepreneurs themselves. Reckless or irresponsible debt was also seen as shameful. Quaker directives ensured that no man should ‘launch into trading and worldly business beyond what they can manage honourably . . . so that they can keep their words with all men’. Even advertising was dismissed as dishonest, mere ‘puffery’: the quality of the product mattered far more than the message. Men like Joseph Rowntree and George Cadbury built chocolate empires at the same time as writing ground-breaking papers on poverty or studies of the Bible, or campaigning against a multitude of Dickensian human rights abuses. Puritanical hard work and sober austerity, with the senses kept in watchful restraint, were the guiding principles.

While it is easy to dismiss such values as antiquated, Quaker capitalism proved extraordinarily successful, and generated a staggering amount of worldly wealth. In the early nineteenth century, around 4,000 Quaker families in Britain ran seventy-four banks and over two hundred companies. As they came to grips with making money, these austere men of God also helped to shape the course of the Industrial Revolution, and the commercial world today.

The chocolate factories of George and Richard Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree inspired men in America such as Milton Hershey, the ‘King of Caramel’, who took philanthropy to a new, all-American scale with the creation of the utopian town of Hershey in the cornfields of Pennsylvania. But the chocolate wars that followed the growth of global trade, and the emergence in the twentieth century of international rivals – such as Frank and Forrest Mars – unshackled by religious conviction, gradually eroded the values that had shaped Quaker capitalism. Some Quaker firms did not survive the struggle, and those that did had little choice but to abandon their Puritan roots. In the process, ownership of the businesses passed from private Quaker dynasties to public shareholders. Little by little, the results of the transition from Quaker capitalism to shareholder capitalism began to take shape in the form of the huge confectionery conglomerates that straddle the corporate world.

Today the world’s two largest food giants – the Swiss Nestlé and America’s Kraft – operate around the globe, feeding humanity’s sweet tooth. Nestlé, with five hundred factories worldwide, sells a billion products every day, giving annual sales of £72 billion. Kraft operates 168 factories, and has annual sales of £26 billion. While these two behemoths are locked in a race to maintain market share in the developed world, they are also selling their Western confections and other processed foods to emerging markets in the developing world. Somewhere along the way the four-hundred-year-old English Puritanical ideal of self-denial and the Quaker vision of creating wholesome nourishment for a hungry and impoverished workforce have disappeared. Also vanished are a myriad of independent chocolate confectionery firms. In Britain alone, Mackintosh of Halifax and Rowntree of York are now owned by Nestlé, while Terry of York, Fry of Bristol and Cadbury have become a division of Kraft.

The origins of this book lie in my search to explore how this happened. I wanted to unearth the true story of the original Quaker chocolate pioneers and the religious beliefs that shaped their business decisions, and to see how their values differ from those of today’s company leaders. At first sight it can appear that globalisation has been profitable for all. It is hard to dispute economists’ claims that the process has lifted billions of people across the world out of the poverty that was on the doorstep of the cocoa magnates of the nineteenth century. But that has also come at a significant cost.

My last visit to Bournville, on a bitterly cold January day in 2010, formed a stark contrast to the peaceful charm of my earlier visits. Outside the factory, staff members with banners were protesting against Kraft’s recently announced takeover of Cadbury. ‘Kraft go to hell,’ said one. In a symbolic gesture, another protester set fire to a huge Kraft Toblerone bar. Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, had warned that thousands of jobs could be eliminated under Kraft. ‘Our members feel very angry and very betrayed,’ said Jennie Formby, Unite’s national officer for food and drink industries. Kraft was borrowing £7 billion to fund the takeover, and many feared that Cadbury could become ‘nothing more than a workhorse used to pay off this debt’, its assets stripped and jobs lost. For the Quaker pioneers, the workforce and the local community were key stakeholders in the business, and they aimed to enhance their lives. Now, with their future uncertain, there was a mood of alienation and powerlessness amongst the staff outside Bournville that day.

Quite apart from the effects on employees and communities, there are additional concerns raised by the Kraft takeover of Cadbury that bring the contrast between Quaker business values and shareholder capitalism sharply into focus. For the nineteenth-century Quaker, ownership of a business came with a deep sense of responsibility and accountability to all stakeholders involved. In today’s system of shareholder capitalism the shareholder is divorced from the responsibilities of business ownership.

The spirit of a business – so crucial to the motivation of its staff – is hard to define or measure. It is not to be found in the buildings or the balance sheet, but it is reflected in the myriad of different decisions taken by those at the helm of the business. The Quaker pioneers believed that ‘your own soul lived or perished according to its use of the gift of life’. For them, spiritual wealth rather than the accumulation of possessions was the ‘enlarging force’ that informed business decisions. But gone now, lost in another century, is that omnipotent all-seeing eye in the boardroom, reminding those Quaker patriarchs of the fleeting nature of their power. And what is there to replace it?

The story of the Quaker chocolate pioneers and their rivals is, in a way, a parable of our times, highlighting a bigger transformation in our society. By examining the ‘chocolate wars’ that have shaped the world of confectionery, I hope to shed light on a process of change that affects us all.