Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (12 page)

I
n York, the Rowntrees appeared to thrive with a quality grocer’s shop in the center of town and a big chocolate factory by the river. But Joseph Rowntree, successful purveyor of superior foods, was worried. The problem was his brother, Henry, and the chocolate factory at Tanner’s Moat, which looked like a medieval castle with its forbidding high walls and blackened windows. It was becoming apparent that Henry had optimistically overreached himself by investing in the rambling complex on the River Ouse. By 1869, after a seven-year struggle, his cocoa was still struggling to find a market and the firm’s future looked uncertain. The prospect of his brother failing was real.

The lesson of years of stern homilies about honoring debt, plain dealing, and trustworthiness began to preoccupy Joseph. He knew perfectly well from the family’s much thumbed copy of the
Rules of Discipline
that a good Quaker should “have a watchful eye over all their members and those heading for commercial trouble should be warned and if required, helped in their difficulties.” Joseph knew Henry was in trouble, running his business in a most eccentric manner with equally eccentric accounts. Their father had died shortly after setting Henry up in the cocoa business, and as his older brother, Joseph felt keenly aware of his duty. Much though he delighted in his role as Master Grocer in his shop, he could not allow himself to put self-interest first when his brother was in need of help.

Even at thirty-three, Joseph Rowntree had already earned a reputation as a man who took his Quaker responsibilities seriously. Having witnessed the horror of the Irish Potato Famine, he had made time while running the grocery shop to undertake an exhaustive study on poverty in England. His study had attempted to investigate not just the effects but also the causes of poverty. Researching back to the time of the Black Death, he had carefully gathered facts on pauperism, illiteracy, crime, and education. He had begun to uncover the complex web of connections that can trap a family in poverty. He published his findings as a paper,
British Civilisation
, which he hoped to present at an Adult School Conference in Bristol in 1864, only to find that fellow Quakers, such as Francis Fry’s nephew, Joseph Storrs Fry II, who was running the conference, urged him to modify his language. The following year, Joseph Rowntree published a more
measured paper,
Pauperism in England and Wales
, a landmark study that set out the figures and questioned the role of church and state in perpetuating social injustice.

Rowntree’s studies were thought-provoking and they gave him confidence in his ability to collect data and analyze problems—traits that he reasoned could help him stabilize his brother’s business. In 1868 he took a bold step. He withdrew his inheritance from the security of the Pavement grocery shop to invest with Henry, hoping to bring order to the bohemian chocolate factory by the river while Henry was put in charge of production. There was every reason to believe that properly run, the factory could turn the corner. After all, other firms were making a profit from cocoa.

But for Joseph, who had a great eye for detail, there was much to vex him as he embarked upon a painstaking examination of his brother’s accounts. Henry liked informality, and a number of irregular and unbusinesslike practices blossomed undisturbed in his factory. It seemed each room, each account book or order book, each pile of receipts offered a fatal flaw. Joseph was confronted by a parrot in the workroom and an obstinate donkey with a predilection for steam baths. The parrot distracted the workers, and the donkey failed to meet Joseph’s exacting calculations for the firm’s transport, stubbornly refusing to budge from the warmth of steam pipes that emerged from the factory walls. The donkey had to go—to be replaced with a much more versatile handcart.

As for the accounts, Joseph’s detailed notebooks from that time reveal long columns as he tried to get to the bottom of debts to York Glass, York Gas, and even to staff, such as the saddler and the parcel delivery service. To resolve discrepancies in the accounts, Joseph was obliged to resort to hearsay to work out liabilities: “Beaumont says he
thinks
[underlined] Epps gave a 7% discount upon his lowest whole sale quotation.” Henry’s staff, as well as Henry, it was clear, were a trifle hazy when it came to the details of the deals they had made. Perhaps that was not surprising with staff that had been pared down to the bone. Seven workers managed the key processes of grinding, roasting, rubbing, and carrying sacks from the warehouse. There were
definitely no spare funds to squander on something that Joseph viewed as disreputable as advertising.

As a small antidote to the Mad Hatter logic of the castle, Joseph Rowntree cast a discerning eye over the competition. Recognizing Cadbury’s potential breakthrough with Cocoa Essence, he began to make discreet enquiries as to where he could purchase machinery to make a purer form of cocoa.

A
t Bridge Street, Richard and George Cadbury were beginning to find their wilderness years were behind them. “The first sign of upward movement,” reported Thomas Little in the packing room, came from a traveller in the Black Country. “The weight of the goods had broken the springs of his van, and he had had to run it into a customer’s cart house for repair and ride home on a horse.” It was one of many clues that they were turning the corner. Skillful use of technology and advertising were winning customers. And once the Cadbury brothers knew what they were doing, the ideas kept coming. Records for the Birmingham patent office show that on November 3, 1869, they sealed a patent for one of the first kinds of chocolate biscuit: “A new improved description of biscuit manufactured from the cocoa bean,” and the search was on for new forms of luxury products.

This amount of progress was not enough for George Cadbury. Seizing the initiative from his rivals, he went on the offensive to promote Cadbury’s pure new cocoa. Aware of the public’s growing sensitivity to food adulteration, he lobbied the government to take action. The addition of other substances made an inferior and less digestible form of cocoa, he argued, and the consuming public should know what they are buying. Eventually he was summoned to a government committee to give evidence. In a troubling move for his competitors, he insisted that only an absolutely pure product, such as Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence, should be called “cocoa.” All other preparations mixed with additional ingredients should be sold under a different name.

The Frys and other cocoa manufacturers woke up to the threat. They began to promote their cocoas, arguing that they only used nutritious additives. It was a bitter battle in which Cadbury benefited greatly from the free publicity, much of it at the hands of their rivals who were protesting the proposed new regulations and insisting that they added only the best ingredients.

The victory, however, went to George Cadbury. The government introduced the Adulteration of Food Acts in 1872 and 1875. Under the new legislation, all ingredients in cocoa had to be listed. The public could see for themselves that Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence was the purist form of cocoa. Worse still, grocers who stocked adulterated cocoas without proper labelling could be prosecuted. Records show the Marylebone police prosecuted a Master Grocer by the name of Mr. Kirby of 212 High Street in Camden after he sold to the inspector two samples of cocoa that were adulterated: One “was manufactured by Messrs Taylor Bros . . . and the other by Messrs Dunn and Hewett and Co.”

As sales of Cocoa Essence rocketed in the early 1870s, the number of employees at the Bridge Street works grew rapidly. For Richard and George, the view from their office windows formed a stark contrast to the view they had ten years earlier. Then an air of neglect was unmistakable surrounding the dying firm. Now, all was bustle and busyness and the applause of horses’ hooves from the crowded courtyard, where carts and carriages waited to transport stock.

T
he early 1870s for the very upright Joseph Rowntree and his brother, Henry, were markedly different: They were still struggling to survive. Joseph meticulously pasted into his notebook some Cadbury’s flyers that were full of exasperating claims: Cadbury’s cocoa went “three times as far” as the best of the other adulterated cocoas and just one halfpenny will “secure a delicious cup of breakfast cocoa.” But Joseph Rowntree was not in a position to take them on. Quite the reverse. He was having such a hard time that the passionate and indignant author of
Poverty in England and Wales
found that
he was able to relax his Quakerly ideals—just a little. The Rowntrees needed a shortcut, a little know-how, some real expertise for turning the unlovely-looking cocoa bean into something deliciously edible in a charming package.

Joseph’s private notebook reveals that in March 1872, he went to London to recruit new employees and did not see anything wrong in conducting a little industrial espionage at the same time. He leased an address in central London at 314 Camden Road and placed advertisements in the London papers, some in the vicinity of Taylor’s Spitalfield works:

Aware of the need for discretion, the Rowntree name did not appear on the advertisements. Applicants were advised to “Apply by letter only to: ‘G.F., 12 Bishopsgate St EC.’ ”

Recording every exacting detail in his elegant longhand, Joseph Rowntree found that the Taylor brothers’ employees were a willing mine of information. He soon received eager replies from a number of their employees such as the mixer and foreman, James French:

Joseph Rowntree came to London to conduct interviews between March 7 and March 12. His records reveal that the interviews went far beyond discussions of the applicant’s experience. Workers were willing to discuss every aspect of the Taylor brothers’ business, details of manufacturing, and even precious recipes—for a sum. One of the first men Joseph hired was James French, who had his fare to York paid, was offered twenty shillings a week, and, most important, given a welcoming “present of 5 pounds” for his Taylor recipes.

James French introduced Rowntree to other workers, such as Robert Pearce of Whitechapel, who claimed to manufacture “all of Taylor’s Chocolate, Chocolate Sticks, and Confection Chocolate.” Pearce was also invited to come to the York factory during his three-week holiday, where he would receive two pounds a week “for imparting all his knowledge.” Other successes followed. William Garrett, who had worked for twelve years at Taylors, received two shillings and six pence for, among other things, a recipe for Unsworth’s Cream Cocoa. Rowntree learned about the technology used by the Taylor brothers from Henry Watkins, a man described as “the cleverest man on Taylor’s Flake Floor,” who could “take a mill to pieces and put it together again.” And after meeting with James Mead of Taylor’s Flake Floor, who received ten shillings, Rowntree was able to set out pages of detail covering Taylor’s manufacturing processes. To prepare Rock Cocoa, Rowntree knew the exact order in which the Taylors added the ingredients, the ratios of different types of beans, and even the temperature of the mixer: “as hot as the hand can comfortably bear and sometimes [by accident] gets hotter.” Equally important, he gleaned that Taylor’s Rock Mills were made by a Thomas Neal and made an appointment to meet him.

Quietly, almost unnoticed, Taylor’s men were relieved of valuable knowledge and years of exacting work judging different processes in the making of chocolate. All their labor and expertise was fed to, gobbled up, and digested by the dark, rather religious man with the worried look. Joseph Rowntree was, with a modest sum, the repository of enough information to duplicate key processes in Taylor’s factory.