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Оглавление‘Unforgettabubble, that’s what you are. Unforgettabubble, milk chocolate bar.’ A line of old King Cole for Rowntree’s Aero (1935).
For all the Wonka-esque mystique affected by chocolate makers, most confectionery innovations amount to ‘let’s bung this on top of this, stick some chocolate on it’. The invention of the Aero, however, really did involve science. Rowntree’s technicians frothed up some liquid chocolate with a whisk, poured it into moulds and then – the clever bit – reduced the surrounding air pressure drastically so the tiny bubbles of froth swelled up to a decent size. Then it was a matter of passing the moulds through ice-cold water to set, covering the result with a layer of solid chocolate, and the job was done.
It caused a sensation when it came out, albeit one helpfully whipped up by Rowntree themselves. The exciting new texture, they claimed, ‘stimulates the enzyme glands’ – a bit of shameless quackery they were soon forced to take back. Initially great sales began to tail off, in part due to an assortment of rivals appearing on the scene with undue haste, in particular Fry’s two tryouts, the Ripple and the All-Chocolate Crunchie. Add to that a disputed patent, and things got panicky at Rowntree headquarters. Fruit and nut and whole nut variants were hurriedly bunged out to support the ailing novelty. Sales levelled off after a while, and the Aero, while no longer a craze, remained steady-as-she-goes.
They couldn’t resist mucking about, though. An Aero Wafer introduced in 1950 didn’t hang about too long, but in ’59 the bright idea of changing the aerated centre from chocolate to peppermint gave the bar a new lease of life, and with orange and coffee centres arriving over the next couple of years, a nice little family was built up that would tick over happily for decades, with just a new campaign based around the word ‘bubbles’ knocked out every few years. Oh, and a short-lived lime variant in 1971.
Then, cometh the ‘80s, cometh the Cadbury’s Wispa. Big trouble in Rowntreeland as the potential Aero spoiler was worriedly picked over. Luckily the two-year gestation period Cadbury took to get the Wispa going nationwide allowed Rowntree to remake the Aero in its image. By September of 1982, gone was the six-segmented flat format, a bumpy chocolate version of the traffic-calming measures in a well-to-do Cotswold village. In came the handy ingot size. In the process, something – no one was quite sure what – changed. The chocolate had become softer. No, the bubbles were bigger. No, it’s the taste... It scarcely mattered, as the new bar more than held its own against the Bournville parvenu. But even today, plenty of former stalwart Aerovians feel slighted by the changes, their enzyme glands no longer stimulated in quite the same way.
