“Introduction”
“The wealth and austerity seemed oddly incongruous. Did the one contribute to the other? Cheerful homilies from my father along the lines of “Every mickle makes a muckle” and “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves” did not supply a satisfactory answer. Even a five-year-old knew this was not the key to creating a chocolate factory.”
“Turning the corner in the lane in the autumn of 2007, my heart skipped a beat as I was taken back to that day when my father and uncle, both now much missed, had taken me round the factory. To my surprise, the chocolate works seemed even larger than I remembered. Imposing red brick blocks stood beside the neatly mowed lawn of the cricket pitch with Bournville village and green nestled behind. At the time, Cadbury was the largest confectioner in the world and the only independent British chocolate enterprise to survive from the nineteenth century. I wanted to understand the journey that took my deeply religious Quaker forebears from peddling tins of cocoa from a pony and trap around Birmingham to the Titan-like company that reached around the globe.”
“The story began five generations ago, when a farsighted forbear, 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 that was attracting interest among the colonial brokers of Mincing Lane: cocoa. Was it something to eat or drink? Richard Tapper saw it primarily as a nutritious nonalcoholic drink in a world that relied on gin to wash away its troubles. Never could my abstemiously inclined ancestor have guessed what fortunes were entwined with the humble cocoa bean, although it seemed full of promise: a touch of the exotic.”
“Their approach to the creation of wealth was governed by an entire code of practice developed over generations since the Civil War by their Quaker elders and set out at yearly meetings and in Quaker books of discipline. This nineteenth-century “Quaker capitalism” was far removed from the excesses of the world’s most recent financial crisis, in which business leaders see no harm in pocketing huge personal profits while their companies collapse.”
“For the Quaker capitalists of the nineteenth century, the idea that wealth creation was for personal gain only would have been offensive. Wealth creation was for the benefit of the workers, the local community, and society at large, as well as the entrepreneurs themselves. Reckless or irresponsible debt was also seen as shameful.”
“Quaker directives ensured that no man should “launch into trading and worldly business beyond what they can manage honourably . . . so that they can keep their words with all men.””
“Even advertising was dismissed as dishonest, mere “puffery”: The quality of the product mattered far more than the message.”
“Men like Joseph Rowntree and George Cadbury built chocolate empires at the same time as writing groundbreaking papers on poverty, publishing authoritative studies of the Bible, and campaigning against a multitude of heartrending human rights abuses in a world that seems straight out of Dickens. Puritanical hard work and sober austerity, with the senses in watchful restraint, were the guiding principles. Even art, literature, and theater were dismissed as too great an indulgence.”
“While it is easy to dismiss such values as antiquated notions that governed business life at a time before Darwin’s ideas had taken root, Quaker capitalism proved extraordinary successful, and its puritanical work ethic generated a staggering amount of worldly wealth. In the early nineteenth century, around 4,000 Quaker families ran 74 Quaker British banks and more than 200 Quaker companies. As they came to grips with making money, these austere men of God helped to shape the course of the Industrial Revolution and the commercial world today.”
“The end of an independent Cadbury began with an innocuous voice mail message. In late August 2009, Irene Rosenfeld, chairman of America’s largest food company, Kraft Foods, requested a meeting with the Cadbury chairman, Roger Carr. Kraft Foods made a £10.2 billion ($16.3 billion) bid for the British chocolate company. The bid turned hostile. Five months later, after a long and bitter siege played out in the glare of the media, Kraft won over Cadbury’s shareholders. Britain’s last big chocolate enterprise fell to the American giant after 186 years of independence in one of the largest acquisitions in British corporate history.”
“Today the world’s two largest food companies—the Swiss Nestlé and America’s Kraft—circle the globe, feeding humanity’s sweet tooth. The Americans spend £8 billion ($12 billion) on chocolate; the British spend £3.5 billion ($5.25 billion); and more than one in four people in America and Britain are obese.”
“Yet these two behemoths are locked in a race to maintain market share in the developed world, while also selling their Western confections and other processed foods to emerging markets in the developing world. Somewhere along the way the four hundred-year-old English Puritanical ideal of self-denial and the Quaker vision of creating wholesome nourishment for a hungry and impoverished workforce have disappeared. Also vanished is a myriad of independent chocolate confectionery firms.”
“My taxi driver, whose family was originally from Kashmir, spelled out the crisis. “The chocolate works are British,” he told me firmly. It belongs to the workers and the local people—not just management and shareholders. “The factory should not be moved or closed,” he said. He captured the mood of alienation and powerlessness in the local community, where Birmingham Members of Parliament spearheaded resistance to the takeover in Westminster.”
“The British government’s belief in an open-door policy on such foreign takeovers has been called into question as many British companies have recently slipped into foreign ownership, creating uncertainties about the British economy. The Swiss have always protected Nestlé, allowing their food and chocolate business to flourish. “In France, the loss of a ‘Cadbury’ would have been out of the question,” says former Cadbury chairman Roger Carr. “Germany believes that strength at home is the first step to success abroad. In Japan selling a company over the heads of management is unthinkable. And in the United States, regulations exist to protect strategic assets.””
“It is ironic that when Cadbury tried to buy the British firm of Rowntree in 1988—at the time one of the five largest confectionery firms in the world—it was stopped by the British government—which permitted the Swiss giant, Nestlé, to step in and buy it. “In Westminster they did not understand the global picture,” says Sir Dominic Cadbury, the last family chairman.”
“Leaving aside the social and national issues, there are wider concerns raised by the Kraft takeover that bring the contrast between the Quaker values of the chocolate pioneers and today’s shareholder capitalism sharply into focus. For the nineteenth-century Quaker, ownership of a business came with a deep sense of responsibility and accountability to all those involved.”
““The problem with the way we have developed our system of shareholder capitalism is that the shareholder is being divorced from his role in ownership,” explains Dominic Cadbury.”
“For Timothy Phillips, chairman of The Quakers and Business Group, which aims to promote Quaker principles in business, there is another issue that comes with increasing size to create giants like Nestlé and Kraft. “What one is doing by supporting the argument that bigger is better all the time,” he explains, “is creating essentially a global network of asset ownership on a vast scale.” Nestlé, for example, has almost 500 factories in over 80 countries and sells a billion products worldwide every day.”
“The Quaker pioneers believed that “your own soul lived or perished according to its use of the gift of life.””
“PART I”
“CHAPTER 1 - A Nation of Shopkeepers”
“Machines, oblivious to the seasons, never stopped issuing the unspoken command: more labor, more work, and more toil to feed the looms, to fire the furnaces, and to drive the relentless wheels of commerce and industry far beyond English shores.”
“The town was a beacon of industrial might and muscle. This was where steam and fire forged with iron and coke, metal and clay to make miracles.”
“Walter White toured the Bridge Street factory and has left a vivid account of what it was like in 1852. Leaving behind the storehouse crammed with sacks of cocoa beans from the Caribbean, White entered a room that blazed with heat and noise: the roasting chamber. With its four vast rotating ovens, “the prime mover in this comfortable process of roasting was a 20-horse steam engine.” After this, “with a few turns of the whizzing apparatus,” the husk was removed by the “ceaseless blast from a furious fan” and the cocoa, “now with a very tempting appearance,” was taken for more “intimate treatment.” This occurred in a room where “shafts, wheels and straps kept a number of strange looking machines in busy movement.” After yet more pressing and pounding, a rich frothing chocolate mixture flowed, “leisurely like a stream of half-frozen treacle.” This was formed into a rich cocoa cake, which was shaved to a coarse powder ready for mixing with liquid for drinking.”
“No one had yet uncovered the key to making a fortune from the bewitching little bean imported from the New World. There was no concept of mass-produced chocolate confectionary. In the mid-nineteenth century, the cocoa bean was almost invariably consumed as a drink. Since there was no easy way to separate the fatty cocoa oils, which made up to 50 percent of the bean, from the rest of the bean, it was visibly oily, the fats rising to the surface. Indeed it often seemed that the novelty of purchasing this strange product was more thrilling than drinking it.”
“Customers did not buy it in the form of a powder but as a fatty paste made into a block or cake. To make a drink at home, they chipped or flaked bits off the block into a cup and added hot water—or milk if they could afford it. It is a measure of how badly the Cadbury cocoa business was faring that three-quarters of their trade from the Bridge Street factory came from tea and coffee sales.”
“In a Quaker community, a struggling business was a liability. Failing to honor a business agreement or falling into debt was seen as a form of theft and punished severely. If the cocoa works went under owing money to creditors, Richard and George would face the censure of the Quaker movement or, worse, they would be disowned completely and treated as outcasts within their circle. Quite apart from these strict Quaker rules, in Victorian society business failure and bankruptcy could lead to the debtors’ prison or the dreaded poorhouse, either option raising the prospect of an early grave.”
“One of the problems Richard Tapper had to deal with in his shop was theft. After repeatedly losing silk that cost up to twelve shillings a yard, he felt he had to take action but soon came to regret it. He stopped a woman in his shop who had two rolls of silk hidden under her cloak. When he went to court to hear the outcome, to his alarm the judge sentenced the woman to death. “I was appalled,” Richard Tapper told his children years later, “for I never realised what the sentence would be. Without delay I posted to London, saw the Secretary of State and got the woman’s sentence commuted to transportation.””
“But like many Quakers, according to the *Post*, by far “his most laborious and anxious labours” were devoted to the antislavery movement, “which more or less occupied his time and unwearied attention for upwards of thirty-five years.” Regardless of whether he possessed the same “unwearied attention” for business, it was the custom for the oldest son to inherit the father’s business, and when Benjamin turned thirty, he duly inherited his father’s successful draper’s shop on Bull Street and was happily settled for many years.”
“Today, among the gleaming black facades of Mincing Lane in the City, there is little to give away its colorful past as one of London’s thriving trading markets. But when John Cadbury visited in the 1820s, there was a teeming market where colonial brokers met to trade in different commodities from Britain’s growing empire. There were salesrooms where frenetic auctions were taking place for tea, sugar, coffee, jute, gums, waxes, vegetable oils, spices, and cocoa. Prices and details of business were written on a black board. Samples of goods from warehouses in docks along the nearby Thames were on display. They included the cocoa bean or “nib” from South America, which looked like a huge chocolate-colored almond, still dusted with the dried pulp that surrounded it in the cocoa pod and baked by a tropical sun.
At a time when cocoa was purchased primarily to produce a novelty drink for the rich, John tried to ascertain whether there might be a future in the unpromising black bean.”
“John went to London and apprenticed at the teahouse of Sanderson Fox and Company. While in London he had a chance to see the warehouses of the East India Company and witness the sale of commodities such as coffee and cocoa. The 23-year-old was soon able to tell his father that he was convinced there was potential in the new exotic bean, although he was not yet clear what that potential was.”
“John proudly announced the opening of his shop in the local paper, *Aris’s Birmingham Gazette*, on March 1. After setting out his considerable experience “examining the teas in the East India Company’s warehouses in London,” he drew the public’s attention to something new. He wished to bring “to particular notice” a substance “affording a most nutritious beverage for breakfast . . . Cocoa Nibs prepared by himself.””
“Word of John Cadbury’s quality teas and coffees soon spread among some of the wealthiest and best-known families in Birmingham; his customers included the Lloyds, Boultons, Watts, Galtons, and others.”
