A sweet tale of Canadian-made chocolate treats
Some of these iconic brands got their start with the birth of ‘Quaker capitalism’ in 19th-century England
No matter what had happened at school that day — whether great or ghastly — my friends and I had only one thing on our minds as we headed for the neighbourhood variety store — what chocolate bar to buy. There was so much choice, and so little allowance money. My choices were always gooey, chewy and melty. I agonized over whether to spend my 10 cents on Neilson Jersey Milk Treasures, Mackintosh’s Rolo or Rowntree Maple Buds. On Saturdays, there were shopping trips with my mother and father, who, unlike me, both were quick pickers. My mother liked bars with crispy vanilla wafers and chose a Rowntree Coffee Crisp or Kit Kat, and my father, who liked his milk chocolate straight, chose either a Neilson Jersey Milk or Cadbury Dairy Milk.
Most of those bars are still bestsellers in Canada, and the history of the British and Canadian family firms who shaped the Canadian confections industry lies within their iconic branded wrappers.
John Cadbury, a Quaker, wanted to offer a nutritious, cheap and tasty alternative to gin which he saw ruining the lives of poor labouring families. After opening a tea shop in Birmingham, England, in 1824, he began selling drinking chocolate and cocoa, which he initially made by hand, grinding cocoa beans with a mortar and pestle. By 1842 he was making 16 different kinds of chocolate drinks, and made his first dark chocolate bar in 1849. Cadbury produced its first chocolate Easter egg in 1875 and milk chocolate bar in 1897.
From the start, the goal of “Quaker capitalism” as his descendant Deborah Cadbury terms it in “The Chocolate Wars,” was “for the benefit of the workers, local community, and society at large, as well as the entrepreneurs themselves.”
The company established a pension fund and provided free medical care. In 1893, John’s son, George, built a model village for his employees; Bournville, with 370 homes on 550 acres, included playing fields, a fishing lake, surrounding the Cadbury “factory in a garden,” as described on Cadbury’s U.K. website.
Cadbury Dairy Milk, a milk chocolate bar with a higher proportion of milk than any previous bar recipe, and the first mass-produced bar, was launched in 1905. It was the mainstay of the company and variations were developed — Cadbury Flake in 1920, (crumbly ribbons of chocolate), Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit and Nut in 1928, (with raisins and almonds) and Cadbury Crunchie in 1929, (honeycomb toffee coated in chocolate).
Cadbury entered the Canadian market in 1919 when its British subsidiary, Fry’s, partnered with an American chocolatier to form The Canadian Cocoa and Chocolate company with a plant in Montreal. When the partnership ended in 1930, Cadbury modernized the plant, and began producing their flagship bar Dairy Milk there, among others.
Cadbury merged with Schweppes in 1996 and was subsequently taken over by Kraft Foods in 2010, whose confection division, Mondelez International, now runs it.
Cadbury’s fiercest rival in the chocolate industry was the Rowntree dynasty. Their rivalry — both planted worker spies in each other’s factories — inspired Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” As a schoolboy, Dahl and his classmates at Repton boarding school tasted chocolate bars at Cadbury’s factory. Henry Rowntree, also a Quaker, bought a cocoa production business in York in 1862, aiming, as John Cadbury had, to provide cocoa and chocolate drinks as an appealing replacement for gin. The business struggled until his brother, Joseph, became his partner and French confectioner Claude Gaget joined the company. Gaget invented the original two products that financially consolidated the company: Fruit Pastilles (fruity, chewy candies) in 1881, still sold under the Rowntree brand name; and in 1882, Chocolate Dragees, sugarcoated chocolate beans, the first version of Smarties, which was rebranded in 1937 and targeted to children (available in Canada since 1939).
Joseph Rowntree established benefits and a pension fund for Rowntree employees, as Deborah Cadbury details. A fervent advocate of affordable housing, he began building New Earswick, a garden village modelled on Bournville in 1902 on the outskirts of York for his employees and those living in York’s slums. No pubs were allowed, as in Bournville. In 1904, he established several charitable trusts, funding the upkeep of village housing and social research, dedicating half of his wealth to them. It is still in operation as is Cadbury’s Bournville trust established in 1900.
Eager to enter the Canadian marketplace as a manufacturer rather than an exporter of chocolates, in 1926 Rountree acquired the assets of Canadian chocolate company Cowan’s.
Rowntree continued to lag behind Cadbury’s, never coming up with a milk chocolate bar to rival Dairy Milk. In the 1930s, Seebohm, now running the company, decided to turn the focus to the creation of new types of chocolate bars.
Aero, the aerated milk chocolate bar with the melty bubbly texture was launched in 1935, as was the Kit Kat bar with layers of crispy wafer coated in milk chocolate, available in Canada in 1937. Coffee Crisp, the Canadian adaptation of the Biscrisp bar (with coffeeflavoured soft candy instead of chocolate between layers of vanilla wafer with milk chocolate coating) was invented in Toronto and on the market in 1939. Rowntree was acquired by Nestle in 1988.
Like its British counterparts, the Toronto-based
Neilson’s started as a small family business. After failing at several businesses, William Neilson decided to make ice cream to supplement his wife Mary’s homemade mincemeat shop. He bought three hand-cranking ice freezers. Instead of using milk, as most other ice cream makers were at the time, he used cream. The key to smooth and creamy ice cream lay not just in the cream content (21 to 24 per cent buttermilk) but to very rapid hand-cranking; his second son, Morden, became the family’s official hand-cranker. He produced his first blocks of ice cream in 1893, which sold well enough for him to eventually construct a factory on Gladstone Avenue in 1906. Since ice cream was a seasonal business, to offer his workers yearlong employment, he got into a side business manufacturing bulk and boxed chocolates.
Following his father’s death in 1915, Morden took over the business. He too aspired to create the milk chocolate bar equivalent of Cadbury Dairy Milk, and he did with Neilson Jersey Milk bar in 1924, which became Canada’s bestselling bar in the 1920s. Another enduring Canadian bar, Neilson Crispy Crunch, was created by Harold Oswin. Oswin had joined the company at age 14 as a candy roller. He dreamed of inventing his own bar, kept experimenting and won a company contest with his hard peanut butter flake coated with molasses, sugar and vanilla dipped in milk chocolate, which went on sale in 1930.
Morden was diagnosed with leukemia and died in 1947. The company was bought by George Weston.
Many of the classic Canadian bars are made at the original Neilson chocolate factory on Gladstone Avenue (now owned by Mondelez International) and at Nestle’s Sterling Road plant, the former site of Cowan’s since 1910, then Rowntree. The Gladstone factory produces half a billion chocolate bars a year and the Nestle plant makes 640 million.
Cadbury’s fiercest rival in the chocolate industry was the Rowntree dynasty. Their rivalry inspired Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”