Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (42 page)

Adrian, hankering after a “proper job” at Bournville, was finally permitted to join his older brother. “My first job was a post boy. I must have been thirteen . . . and my last job with Julian was to do the blackout in the chemist’s department. The blinds were huge and there were curtains to put in place before we left for the day.” As the military operation expanded in 1941, Adrian remembers huts were hastily assembled by the canal where workers packed explosives into anti-aircraft rockets.

T
he war reshaped the chocolate business, randomly creating winners and losers depending on accidents of geography or birth. One winner was Forrest Mars.

From his factory in Newark, New Jersey, Mars was uniquely placed to benefit under the nurturing wing of his rival, Milton Hershey. William Murrie did all he could to help his son, Bruce, and Forrest
secure a foothold in the market. When M&Ms were launched in 1940, many firms faced shortages of cocoa and sugar, but William Murrie made sure that his son was never short of chocolate.

Despite this support, sales of M&Ms were slow to take off, and Forrest could not restrain his volatile bad temper. According to
Fortune
in 1967, just the sight of an ill-wrapped candy bar could provoke outrage. Once he became so incensed that staff watched in astonishment as “Mars hurled candy bars one by one against the glass panel in the board room.” The
Washington Post
reported, “He would abruptly sack any worker who failed to meet his exacting standards.” No one was spared the explosive tirades, not even his partner, Bruce.

Forrest Mars finally had a chance to meet Milton Hershey, now a frail old man in his eighties, who was perhaps touched to recognize a fleeting image of himself in the enthusiastic entrepreneur. “It is strange how some ideas stay with you,” Forrest told Don Gussow in an interview in 1966. “I remember how Milton Hershey admonished me: ‘Don’t ever go public!’” Forrest took the sober warning from America’s chocolate king to heart.

Nestlé also scaled up their American enterprise during the Second World War. The versatile Swiss, equipped with lessons from the Great War, made a radical decision when war broke out. The management team was simply divided in half: Senior staff, including the company chairman, Edouard Muller, moved to offices in Stamford, Connecticut, to expand operations in North and South America. The other half stayed at Nestlé’s headquarters in Vevey to run European operations as best they could as the horror of war approached the Swiss border.

The Nestlé staff in Vevey struggled with an extraordinary set of circumstances. Nestlé’s Tempelhof works in Berlin fell within the borders of the Third Reich. Nestlé’s premises at Lisieux, France, were bombed. They were shut out of their most profitable European market in Britain. Europe belonged to Hitler. Strategies were changed over night as armies were moved like chessmen. Produce was requisitioned; food was in short supply. How different were the fortunes of the Nestlé group in America. They thrived thanks to a remarkable
reaction to a very novel product: Nescafé. Instant coffee was such an instant success that by the end of 1940, 6,000 cases a month were being sold in fifty-three of America’s largest cities.

The war reached a new crisis. Japanese bombers sunk or damaged eighteen American warships in Pearl Harbor. The next day America joined the war—an event Milton Hershey had long anticipated. As young men left Derry Township to enlist, Hershey and Murrie stepped up production of a unique kind of chocolate bar called Field Ration D
.
Crammed with vitamins, the Ration D bar could be drenched with tropical rain and remain dry; it could bake in the sun and not melt. Other types of specially adapted chocolate soon followed, such as Ration K chocolate. With one billion bars supplied to the troops over four years, it is hardly surprising that Hershey’s profits nearly doubled during the war, reaching $80 million in 1944.

Milton Hershey was once again at the heart of this chocolate bonanza—but his time was running out. His heart was weakening, and his days were increasingly confined to two rooms he had kept for himself at High Point, surrounded by photographs of Kitty. He still enjoyed experimenting with new products, and his staff was baffled by some of his more eccentric ideas: a sweet potato fudge, a soap with medicinal properties, a nondairy ice cream. His nurses found him quixotic and playful. Harkening back to his Cuban days, he might dress up smartly, mask his grey hair and wrinkles with sunglasses and hat, and have a flutter on the racetrack or in the casinos. With the carelessness of someone who no longer considered the outcome, he ignored doctor’s instructions on drink and rich food and enjoyed champagne whenever he was in the mood.

He still delighted in visiting the Hershey Industrial School, which had expanded rapidly and was home to over a thousand boys who lived in surrounding farms and homes. Many had been rescued from extremes of poverty and hardship and felt deep gratitude to Milton Hershey. On one occasion when he attended the school assembly, he
rose to speak. The room erupted in clapping and cheering. Hershey was overcome, and tears rolled down his cheeks. The man of few words could not speak at all: He simply waved his exit.

When eighty-eight-year-old Milton Hershey died in October 1945, 10,000 people passed by his open casket, mourning the loss of a “fairy god-father.” Inspired by the Quakers and other philanthropists, he had given away most of his wealth and had earned legendary status in America. Eight graduates of the Hershey Industrial School served as pallbearers in a procession that stretched almost a mile to the Hershey cemetery. Everyone in town wanted to pay their respects as his casket was taken to the vault where he was reunited with his beloved wife. “When we thank God for his life,” said the Reverend John Treder in the eulogy, “it will be for the vision it held of a better life for other men.” For most there was a certainty that his utopian dream would survive and “his spirit would live on.”

The loss of such a giant among the superheroes of the industrial age in America left a vacuum. And there were plenty whose sights were set on filling that void—no matter what it took.

At Bournville in the final months of the war, an exhausted seventy-one-year-old Edward Cadbury stepped down as chairman and handed the reins to his younger brother Laurence, the fifth family member to assume the role. Laurence’s family, now reunited, welcomed another new arrival, Jocelyn, born in 1946.

The thrill of pulling down the blackout curtains was quickly gone. Although the war was over, the state tightened its grip on the economy. The country was on its knees. Britain accepted Marshall Aid from America. There was nothing to buy. Everything was rationed from food to furniture. It was still austerity Britain.

At Bournville, any expectation of relaunching much loved brands like Dairy Milk evaporated with a shortage of supplies. Total output was less than half prewar levels, while rationing of only three ounces per person of confectionery a week continued. In York, George Harris
was impatient to reintroduce his popular prewar countlines. Rowntree’s milk Kit Kat made a brief appearance in 1945 only to be replaced with wartime plain Kit Kat the next year. Harris was obliged to work with Paul and Laurence Cadbury to negotiate with the Ministry of Food on joint supplies for years to come.

Recovery was slow. Four years elapsed before the government lifted confectionery rationing on April 24, 1949. The result took everyone by surprise. There was such pent-up demand that sweetshops simply ran out of stock. Faced with a shortage of supplies, they had to close for weeks on end. Rationing was reintroduced in August. With ten years of no growth at home, the British confectionery companies struggled.

Laurence looked to develop opportunities overseas. “It was quite a long haul to get Australia profitable,” recalls Adrian, who was then doing military service in the Coldstream Guards in Tripoli. He knew his father was facing stiff competition from the local firm, MacRobertson’s. “New Zealand—absolutely fine, but Canada,” he shakes his head. “We got there first. Our milk chocolate set the standard.” Yet with such a small market in such a large country, it was hard to build a profitable business. But there was one other obvious target. “The New World,” continues Adrian. “It was emerging as a superpower. It was clearly such an important market in terms of size and wealth. Given that we were up against entrenched competitors in Europe, America must have looked tantalising.”

While leading European chocolate firms were crippled by rationing, in America, the Hershey Company was in a unique position to expand. During the war, American troops had introduced the delights of Hershey’s chocolate across the world. Yet Hershey executives remained focused on the home market and failed to exploit their advantage. In fact, the Hershey bar was so popular they did not even see any need to advertise.

In 1948, Laurence Cadbury had a very good reason to feel confident. Research in six American cities showed that 60 percent of Americans tested preferred the taste of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk to the stronger taste of the Hershey bar. Everything augured well for Cadbury
to do battle with the American icon with an icon of its own: a five-cent bar of Dairy Milk
.
They started on the West Coast and sales began to grow. But for Laurence, the excitement of the American initiative was disrupted by terrible news.

On July 26, 1950, his oldest son, twenty-four-year-old Julian, died in a motorcycle accident in France. At the time, Adrian, like his older brother, was reading economics at Cambridge, and he found his student days were “overshadowed” by Julian’s death. “Not only had we always been close,” he said, “but I suddenly became the eldest member of the family with responsibilities I had never envisaged.” His older brother had been an intrepid athlete, and Adrian now threw himself into sport representing the university in the Oxbridge boat race and skiing championships. “I knew it would mean a great deal to my father,” he said. As responsibility slowly settled on his shoulders, he found himself eager to start at Bournville.

His father’s plans for America were not going well. Building on their success on the West Coast, Laurence organized a major launch of Dairy Milk in 1951 supported by a large advertising campaign. But it was soon clear that something was wrong. They were reliant on distributors who failed to get the stock into the shops. Vast quantities of chocolate were left unsold in various depots. When Dairy Milk was available, the public preferred what they knew, the familiar taste of Hershey. The Cadbury name was unknown in America and the launch failed.

Forrest Mars noted Cadbury’s difficulties with interest. He too had a plan to take on Hershey—and in a curious twist, he had a head start. Estranged from his father for much of his life, in death, the terms of his father’s will acknowledged his only son. When Frank Mars’s second wife, Ethel, died in 1945, Forrest inherited half her shares in the business. At last, he had a stake in his father’s Chicago firm—approximately one-third of the business. Forrest also bought out his own partner, Bruce Murrie, thereby gaining complete control of the M&Ms plant in New Jersey. His plan was to bring the two Mars enterprises together into one great empire that would be a fitting challenger to the Hershey giant.

There was one obstacle: his half sister, Pattie. She held another third of the Chicago stock and influenced by her uncle, Ethel’s brother, William Kruppenbacher, she had no interest in selling her shares to Forrest. In the bitter family battle that ensued, Forrest at one stage was banned from the Chicago offices by his step-uncle. But Forrest was not one to give up easily. The feud became so acrimonious that Kruppenbacher ultimately gave way and permitted Mars control of a third of the board.

With his hard-won influence, Forrest argued for a complete overhaul of the Chicago factory. Just as Cadbury had mechanized the production of block chocolate, he wanted to mass-produce countlines. It took five years to carry out his plan, but by 1959, Snickers, Milky Way, Mars bars, and 3 Musketeers could be made at breakneck speed as strips of toffee and nougat were hurtled through sprays of chocolate and guillotines to the automatic wrapping room. Manufacturing time per bar was reduced from one day to less than one hour
.
Meanwhile his own brand of M&Ms finally caught on, becoming the best-selling confectionery in America. But it wasn’t enough. Forrest wanted complete control of his father’s factory. Nothing less would satisfy him.