In a world closing in on us, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become mundane — one of many headlines. When reporting accidents or terror strikes, the average hack is known to ask how many, so she can decide on the display. These days, she asks how much.
As a matter of fact, just when your reviewer began to write this piece, the Energy Editor came to say that Petronas had sold 11 per cent in Cairn India to Vedanta. True to type, the first question was: What is the deal size? Big enough, the colleague said, but focusing on the deal size alone would be missing the point, because this also meant that Vedanta was confident of getting the sticky deal cleared.
Salient, indeed! But what Deborah Cadbury has done is to make this reviewer think beyond the regulatory and related implications. Even M&A stories have a human side. In the case of Kraft of the US acquiring Cadbury of the UK, it involved thousands of human stories because Cadbury was built over 186 years in adherence to what the writer calls the Quaker principle of altruism: thou shall not wait to become enormously rich before thinking of philanthropy; thou shall do things that benefit others from the beginning.
In Deborah Cadbury, this story found the unique narrator — a historian who writes well. So this book is well-researched and lucid. Equally importantly, she is part of the extended family that lends its name to one of the world’s best-known chocolate brands. Deborah was raised on chocolate and her childhood memories include several visits to Bournville. Not surprisingly, she writes with feeling.
The story, she says, began when 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: Cocoa. Was it something to eat or drink? Richard Tapper saw it as a nutritious non-alcoholic drink in a world that relied on gin to wash away its troubles.
His grandsons, George and Richard Cadbury, turned a struggling business into a chocolate empire in one generation. George, in 1866, bought a machine from the Dutch manufacturer Van Houten, which allowed him to refine cocoa more efficiently. The result – Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence – was more expensive, but also more pure. Cadbury could tom-tom this at a time when some traders did not think twice before colouring their cocoa with brick dust. In 1904, George figured how to match the Swiss in creaminess. Cadbury’s new product was called Dairy Maid, which made way for Dairy Milk soon on the advice of the daughter of the owner of a Plymouth confectionery shop.
As their business grew, the Cadburys found themselves in competition with their Quaker friends and rivals Joseph Rowntree in York, and Francis Fry and his nephew Joseph in Bristol. Cadbury merged with its Quaker rival, JS Fry & Sons, in 1919. “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,” says the writer. She writes with authority about the link between the slave trade and cocoa beans, including the time that a newspaper accused the company of profiting from slavery in Africa.
The writer, to be fair, does not confine herself to Kraft-Cadbury. She captures the evolution of the chocolate companies and the various battles they fought. She tells how in Switzerland Lindt’s new grinding technique produced an innovative, silky chocolate fondant and Nestle managed to successfully mix water in milk with the fats in cocoa to produce the first milk chocolate. There is the tale of Milton Hershey, the child of a broken marriage, who chose to bet – and lost – on an unpredictable father, who had to borrow constantly from wealthy uncles until, through trial and error, he hit upon the right formula of milk, sugar and cocoa that enabled him to realise his dream of mass-producing and distributing milk chocolate candy.
But she is best when talking about the takeover that seems to have affected her personally, the one that began with an innocuous voice mail message in late August 2009, in which Irene Rosenfeld, chairman of Kraft Foods, requested a meeting with the Cadbury chairman, Roger Carr. She also mourns the takeover of other British chocolate companies. “The sweet aroma of chocolate still wafts over the suburbs of York and down Haxby Road to Joseph Rowntree’s original factory, which is owned today by Nestle. The factory is now surrounded by metal railings, and is patrolled by security guards…. As I pressed my face to the window to glimpse inside, I saw little more than gathering dust and papers scattered on the floors of the empty rooms before a guard with a dog came to move me on.” Was there a teardrop or two on the manuscript she sent to the publisher?
CHOCOLATE WARS
Deborah Cadbury
HarperPress
340 pages; Rs 399