Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (13 page)

It seems that Rowntree was not overly troubled by his conscience, for in April, he was back for more information, before a brief trip to Germany, where he gathered price lists and technical information about companies such as the Stollwerck Brothers of Cologne. June 1872 brought the intrepid traveller back to London. In the interim, more advertisements appeared in local London papers, such as the following in the
Stoke Newington
press. Having gleaned all he could about Taylor’s Rock Cocoa on his first visit, this time he wanted to learn more about Soluble Cocoa.

Word was spreading. Henry Richard Thompson had been at the chocolate firm of Dunn and Hewitt in Pentonville for thirty years. Thompson was offered an opportunity “to come down for at least 4 weeks to teach all he knows, wages 2 pound per week. One pound to be allowed for each railway journey to York and a lump sum of 10 pounds to be given for the receipts and the knowledge.”

Joseph Rowntree also decided to take a closer look at his Quaker rivals. He took the train to Bristol and met Fry’s workers, including men such as J. Charles Hanks. Hanks claimed to have all of Fry’s
recipes. When he arrived in Birmingham, Joseph Rowntree was particularly keen to make contact with French workers involved in the manufacture of Cadbury’s Fancy Box. Soon after, he went to Paris. The “object of this journey,” he wrote, was to make enquiries of certain French chocolatiers, such as Emile Menier at Noisiel sur Marne.

It speaks volumes about the struggle to survive the intense competition that Joseph Rowntree, a man who in public epitomized Quaker virtue, a man whose principles led him to spurn advertising as dishonest, would engage in such subterfuge. Bribing workers to elicit his rivals’ secrets fell far short of the ideals of honesty and plain dealing required of Quakers, but if he wrestled with his conscience, there is no record of it in his notes. Remarkably, even as he was engaged in this discreet espionage of his Quaker competitors, he also wrote to both Fry and Cadbury to suggest that they collaborate. He proposed that the Quaker firms unite on price and discounts to help them all deal with the foreign competition. Such unified action, he argued, would enable Quaker values to survive.

M
eanwhile in Birmingham, the Cadbury brothers realized they were making headway. After the introduction of the new legislation, orders began pouring in for Cocoa Essence. It slowly dawned on them that the factory, for so long a millstone that imprisoned them in a rigid regime of work, was making a profit. The future need not be as spartan as the past.

Richard was ready for some warmth and charm in his life. He met and fell in love with Emma, the daughter of Mrs. Wilson, who ran the nursery. He bought the perfect home that backed onto the canal. “Every time I come into the house I think of you,” he told Emma. “It seems like one real step to having you here, to have a home for you. . . . I have given you all my heart, and I have not much else to give you, but all that I have seems to belong to you quite as much as to me.” They married in July 1871.

Even George, whose horizons had been so narrowed by work, fell under the hypnotic spell of their modest success. He met twenty-two-year-old Mary Tyler through his cousin, and a relationship soon developed. Ten years of ruthless self-denial and austerity made it hard for him to express his emotions. “A Spartan severity,” writes his biographer, Alfred Gardiner, “was the key note and the senses were kept in rigorous and watchful restraint.” The reserve of his letter of proposal contrasts with that of his brother: “I feel that thou dost love the Saviour,” he wrote to his prospective fiancée. “And that if we were united together it would be in Him, and that thus united we should calmly, peacefully & joyously pass through life’s journey.”

Mary Tyler was so confused by George’s formality and unromantic approach that she consulted her mother, who was equally baffled. “We are quite at a loss how to council thee. . . . It certainly struck us the letter was written without ardour, and in a businesslike manner,” Mrs. Tyler replied to her daughter, “without even saying that he felt a strong preference for thee.”

George may not have realized just how much his austerity and restraint, which had served him so well in business, threatened this delicate opportunity. Mr. and Mrs. Tyler sensed that their daughter was unsure. “Are we not right in judging that thy feelings on the subject are a little doubtful and mingled?” inquired her mother. She went on, “If looking to the future thou feels pretty sure thou couldst not really enjoy his companionship in the very nearest of relations, why the best way is to send him a positive refusal.”

Mary could not bring herself to this point. Later that summer, Mary’s parents arranged to meet George for a short break in South-end. Away from the confines of the factory, George’s feelings were more in evidence. Abandoning his ingrained sense of discipline and restraint, when he arrived in the town and found that Mary was not at the arranged meeting place, “He set off to run like a boy, running all the way to our lodgings,” to find her. Over the following few days, the restrained and saintly George found a way to express his love, and Mary had a “sweet look of quiet joy.”

The couple married in April 1872. An extensive honeymoon in Switzerland, France, and Rome was planned. For the first time in more than a decade, George abandoned the shackles of business for a tour of Europe with his young bride. As he boarded the train for departure to France, the world of the factory faded—but not by much.

Unknown to the Cadbury brothers, who at last appeared to have success in their sights, two Swiss entrepreneurs were secretly working on a breakthrough so critical it would transform the destiny of the “food of the gods.” In doing so, they had the potential to destroy the English manufacturers.

The legend began in a small way when a young entrepreneur, Daniel Peter, completed his apprenticeship with a candlemaker in Alsace and came to the picturesque town of Vevey nestled in the Swiss Alps. But his plan to set up shop as a candlemaker with his brother, Julian, was overtaken by events. In the mid-nineteenth century, a method of distilling kerosene from oil was found. This was swiftly followed by the development of the kerosene lamp with a clean-burning light, making the old flickering tallow candles and whale oil lamps of the past obsolete. The future looked lighter and brighter, but not for a candlemaker.

Daniel Peter continued to run the Frères Peter Candle Company with his brother, but he also found time to pursue his keen interest in the manufacture of food. With breakthroughs in food processing, canned meat, pea soup, and bottled fruit were just some of the novelties being dished up by man and machine. The centuries-stale
ship’s biscuit was being transformed into a miracle of standardized temptations; even condiments were getting a modern makeover. The days when convenience food tended to be soup or hot eels from a street vendor were over. “Without a doubt, industrial products intended as food offer manufacturers the best prospects for success,” observed Peter. “These processed foods are consumed every day and unlike other products, there is a constant demand for them that is not subject to the whims of fashion.”

Peter’s opportunity to move into the food business proved to be right on his doorstep, when he fell in love with a local girl, Fanny Cailler, and married her in 1863. Her father had created a chocolate factory, the first in Switzerland to mechanize the process of grinding cocoa beans. For Daniel Peter, his father-in-law’s chocolate business was an inspiration. The more he learned about cocoa, the more convinced he was that it had an exciting future. Cocoa, he predicted, would become a regular part of people’s diet like coffee. Full of optimism, he set off to Lyon to work in a chocolate factory and master the exotic craft of the French chocolatier.

In 1867, the year that the Cadbury brothers’ Cocoa Essence was taking off in Britain, thirty-one-year-old Peter returned to Vevey in Switzerland to start a chocolate business of his own. He and Fanny settled at 13 Rue des Bosquets, and next door at No. 12, he proudly attached his nameplate to his second company: Peter-Cailler et Compagnie. In this picturesque setting, nestled into the foothills of snowcapped mountains, he hoped to create the perfect chocolate.

According to one family story, it took a crisis to lead Peter to the breakthrough that would transform chocolate across the world. On September 30, Fanny gave birth to a baby daughter named Rose Georgina Peter, but there was a problem. Rose rejected her mother’s breast milk. With each hour slipping by and their baby unable to feed, the young parents became distraught. Peter appealed for help from a neighbor, a trader who was something of a local celebrity. For the man he turned to was none other than the acclaimed German inventor Henry Nestlé.

H
enri Nestlé looks out from his sepia Victorian photograph, his dark, slightly hooded eyes betraying an intensity and air of concentration. His thinning hair is neatly swept back from a broad forehead; the customary beard, a little unruly, the only hint of disorder. This imposing figure was known locally as a merchant, but he had real flair as a scientist and entrepreneur.

When Peter arrived on his doorstep looking for help, Henri Nestlé was on the verge of a life-changing advance. He had just begun selling a special type of “milk flour” for babies, using his own formula for creating powdered milk. Peter and his wife were desperate for baby Rose to try Nestlé’s special formula.

Born in Frankfurt in 1814, Heinrich Nestlé left Germany as a young man to travel, and like Peter, he chose to settle by the beautiful shores of Lake Geneva in Vevey. Changing his name to Henri Nestlé, he rapidly demonstrated his versatility as an entrepreneur, a maverick, and a scientist. Quite apart from his trade as a druggist, selling medicines, seeds, and mustard, his interest in oil lamps flourished into a business for the manufacture of liquid gas. His small company lit a dozen or so of the gas lamps in Vevey and also manufactured fertilizer. Like Peter, Henri Nestlé was intrigued by developments in food manufacture, and by 1847, he had begun to research infant feeding. This was an era still plagued by infant mortality. In Switzerland, one in five babies died before their first birthday. The challenge for Henri Nestlé was to create a new type of food for babies whose mothers were unable to breast-feed.

Since milk turned rancid so quickly, the puzzle was how to keep milk fresh. Using his own kitchen as a laboratory, Nestlé experimented with different ways of preserving whole milk. By 1866 he had a solution. He found a way to create a milk powder concentrated by an air pump at low temperature that he believed was as “fresh and wholesome” as Swiss milk “straight from the cow’s udder.” To this he added a cereal, “baked by a special process of my invention,” to create a unique formula he called
farine lactée
.

By chance in September 1867, Henri Nestlé was approached by a friend who was treating a premature baby boy. The baby was convulsive and could not breast-feed or keep down any alternative; his
mother was very ill as well. After fifteen days, the baby’s survival hung in the balance, but to the family’s delight, they discovered that he was able to digest Nestlé’s formula. News of this “miracle” spread across town.

It was an anxious moment when Daniel and Fanny Peter tried to coax baby Rose to drink Henry Nestlé’s formula. The baby was fretful, hungry but unable to keep food down. After a few moments came the sounds the distraught parents had so longed to hear: normal suckling from a contented baby. The milk lived up to its promise. Rose recovered and began to put on weight.

Doctors tested the product and reached the same result. Mothers began to ask for it. Despite sceptics who insisted it was no more than a “sack of flour,” Nestlé was full of confidence in his new invention. “My discovery has tremendous value,” he declared, “for there is not another food comparable to my baby food.” In 1868 after successful launches in Vevey and Lausanne in Switzerland and his hometown of Frankfurt, demand continued to rise. Certain of success, he dispatched a sales team in France and ventured to England to open an office in London. “Believe me it’s no small matter to market an invention in four countries simultaneously,” he said. He installed a large new vacuum pump and was able to manufacture more than a half-ton of dried infant milk a day. Even with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, which made it harder to move goods around Europe, the company’s growth seemed unstoppable.