A rocky road for Cadbury’s
Pineapple Lumps and Jaffas are Kiwiana favourites, but an American food giant is testing our loyalty.
IT’S probably Willy Wonka’s fault that chocolate factories seem cool. Roald Dahl’s original 1964 novel, and the visualisations in the classic 1971 film, Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory, captured the imagination of children and adults everywhere.
Consequently, I was a bit disappointed when I first set foot in Cadbury’s old factory on Rosebank Rd in the heart of industrial West Auckland.
My mother used to work there and as a kid, I would pop in sometimes to visit.
There was no flowing river of chocolate, edible mushrooms and teacups, fudge room, inventing room, or lickable wallpaper. No glass elevator that shot through the roof into the sky to provide panoramic views of the city.
But what it had – once you donned your white gumboots, protective smock and hygienic hat and walked through the giant doors – was a small army of dedicated workers who delighted in producing some of New Zealand’s favourite sweet treats.
My mother was a nurse in Samoa. On arrival in New Zealand, she was told she’d have to do more study if she wanted to work as a nurse here.
As the eldest in her family, the pressure was on to start earning money for the family back in the Islands straight away. If she’d stuck with nursing, she would have happily spent her whole working life doing that.
But with no money to pay for the study, she shelved her dreams of becoming a nurse and scored a job at the Cadbury factory as a machine operator.
A year later, she was made a supervisor, a position she held from 1979 until 2009, when it finally closed its doors.
My mother recalls being angry when the news was announced that the factory would shut. The employees and the employers there felt like one big family. The people were the reason she loved the job so much.
She still misses the people she worked with, even now. Working with a group of people on the same factory floor for a few decades builds that sort of bond.
But even though the management proved great bosses who worked hard to make sure that their hundreds of displaced workers would find new jobs, I couldn’t help but be upset at my mum’s factory closure. As a silent protest, I stopped buying most Cadbury chocolate.
The fact that they still had a factory in Dunedin meant that I would still buy the classic Cadbury Kiwi staples like Pineapple Lumps, Jaffas and even Snifters.
I’ll have to reassess that, following this week’s announcement that the Dunedin factory will close and production will shift to Australia.
It just won’t feel or taste the same. Sweets made in Australia, like their Twisties always taste different to the ones produced here.
This is more than just sad news for the city of Dunedin, which will lose one of its biggest employers next year. Cadbury products – like Pineapple Lumps – are part of growing up in New Zealand.
One of their lollies became a term of insult for the one third of the population who live in Auckland. That these treats were produced here was an important part of that.
Things were already a little shaky for Cadbury a few years ago when they substituted cocoa butter for vegetable fat, containing palm oil. The resulting consumer backlash forced them to stop this in 2009.
Cadbury’s owners, American food giant Mondelez International, think it will be a simple case of saving money by lowering production costs, but maintaining their market share.
New Zealanders’ loyalty towards a brand is hard won. It can all erode very quickly and, once lost, is tough to get back.
John Cadbury in Birmingham started the brand in 1824, selling his own cocoa and drinking chocolate at his grocery store.
Sixty years after that, the Dunedin factory opened and Cadbury evolved to become one of this New Zealand’s most beloved brands, as if it originated here.
Now with this news, time will tell if that loyalty will endure, but somehow I doubt it.