Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry

(Paperback)

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The delicious true story of the early chocolate pioneers by the award-winning writer, and direct descendant of the famous chocolate dynasty, Deborah Cadbury
In 'Chocolate Wars' bestselling historian and award-winning documentary maker Deborah Cadbury takes a journey into her own family history to uncover the rivalries that have driven 250 years of chocolate empire-building.

In the early nineteenth century Richard Tapper Cadbury sent his son, John, to London to study a new and exotic commodity: cocoa. Within a generation, John's sons, Richard and George, had created a chocolate company to rival the great English firms of Fry and Rowntree, and their European competitors Lindt and Nestl. The major English firms were all Quaker family enterprises, and their business aims were infused with religious idealism.

In America, Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars proved that they had the appetite for business on a huge scale, and successfully resisted the English companies' attempts to master the American market. As chocolate companies raced to compete around the globe, Quaker capitalism met a challenge that would eventually defeat it. At the turn of the millennium Cadbury, the sole independent survivor of England's chocolate dynasties, became the world's largest confectionary company. But before long it too faced a threat to its very survival, and the chocolate wars culminated in a multi-billion pound showdown pitting independence and Quaker tradition against the cut-throat tactics of a corporate leviathan.

Featuring a colourful cast of savvy entrepreneurs, brilliant eccentrics and resourceful visionaries, Chocolate Wars is the story of a uniquely alluring product and of the evolution, for better and worse, of modern business.

Reviews

'What emerges from Deborah Cadbury's vibrant history is the growing importance of advertising, the birth of brands and the impact of the financial markets' appetite for profit over national interest or social welfaremost poignant is her portrait of an impressive pair of brothersengaging and scholarly, confident and compassionateless a family biography than an impressively thought-provoking parable for our times' Daily Telegraph

This is history, brought bang up to date, in the hands of a master chocolatier-storyteller Evening Standard

'There are fascinating things hereI relished the story of chocolate itself' Observer

'Clear, readable and richly detailed' Sunday Times

Author Bio

Deborah Cadbury is the award-winning TV science producer for the BBC, including Horizon for which she won an Emmy . She is also the highly- acclaimed author of The Feminisation of Nature and The Dinosaur Hunters.