Cadbury closure: Time for a rethink?
LIKE a good number of Dunedin families, my mum worked for Cadbury’s and we enjoyed the spoils of the spoilt chocolate biscuits and chocolates in their brown paper bags! Those bags of notquiterights have been a rite of passage for so many Dunedin families. No more.
After decades (and diets!) away, I’d return as the events manager for the Dunedin City Council. Dunedin had precious few events at the time and Mayor Sukhi Turner asked me to investigate a winter festival.
I rang the Queenstown skifields and asked if we could borrow a snowmaking machine. Yes, if the Octagon gets to 5degC on five consecutive days. I couldn’t be sure the Octagon ever got to 5degC. Well you can’t have one then, they told me. Time to call up the DYBBG.
The ‘‘Dunedin You Bloody Bewdy Group’’ was a promotions/ideas group comprising the ORFU, ODT, Speight’s, OUSA and DCC as the core. It was formed on the advice of Greg O’Brien, then marketing manager for the Otago Rugby Football Union, that the city should be promoting itself off the Highlanders and expanded into anything and everything unique to Dunedin.
What’s unique to Dunedin about winter when it doesn’t even get cold enough? Then that unique smell on the air blew in the window . . . chocolate. The smell of the Cadbury factory. Hot chocolate, puddings — the Cadbury Chocolate Carnival. John Carlyle from Cadbury joined the group and the programming started. Paul Dwyer from the ODT suggested rolling giant Jaffas out of a concrete mixer down Stuart St. Funny but daft . . . but notso if promoting another uniquetoDunedin attraction. So the Jaffa race down Baldwin St was born.
Some months before the event was announced, we were asked to meet Arrow International. It was the project manager doing a feasibility study for a tourist attraction to be built into the Cadbury factory . . . Cadbury World. The big attraction of that would be the tour of the factory which had been stopped some years earlier. Would the Cadbury Chocolate Carnival become an annual event? Because that would assure the Cadbury World development. It did.
So. The Cadbury factory is to close. That was (is?) the major attraction of Cadbury World. Why keep it going? And what’s the point of running the Cadbury Chocolate Carnival when it’s no longer promoting anything unique to Dunedin? Mind you, Rainbow Confectionery (formerly Regina) is just up the road.
I wonder how it would feel about a ‘‘Rainbow Go Fushing’’ scavenger hunt all over Dunedin unique locations to find bags of its delicious wee
‘‘chocolate fush’’? Might need to get the DYBBG back together again.
Islay McLeod
Seacliff
IN March 1930 the British company Cadbury Brothers, along with J.S. Fry & Sons, bought a controlling share of a small but successful business set up in Dunedin in 1868 by the Hudson family to make biscuits. For the new British owners this would prove to be a foot in a closing door, for the 1930s would be a decade when governments would increase import restrictions on overseasmade biscuits and confectionery, and in 1939 ban imports of them altogether. Cadbury Fry Hudson, as the Dunedinbased company became known, obtained a dominant position in the New Zealand market, keeping it for the many postwar decades when import restrictions protected local industry and workers’ jobs.
But now the wheel has turned full circle and the multinational owner wants to close the factory and move production to Australia. We can only hope that some innovative local companies can fill the shoes of the Hudson family, who for many years made the water biscuits, wine biscuits, digestive biscuits and malt biscuits that were essential items at the Victorian table. New Zealanders still eat biscuits, but in the 21st century we need biscuits without additives, excessive sugar or salt. That is the challenge for the future. Helen Leach
Opoho
Rabbit virus
I WONDER what the Otago Regional Council has concluded will be the effect on any humans or animals, and let’s not forget Maggie Barry’s protected birds, that eat or otherwise come into contact with Korean virusinfected rabbits?
R. S. Hogan
Waikouaiti