A Brief History of Chocolate. Steve Berry

of the world that, regarding nuts (whole hazelnuts), Cadbury take them and they cover them in chocolate. To seal this fightback, the bars themselves also became thicker (and pricier) once more.

      Chock-A-Block. Astronomer’s favourite, Mars Galaxy (1960) and the less-than-stellar Cadbury’s Big One (1971).

      The ever-changing sizes were in part due to the rocketing price of cocoa, which increased tenfold between 1973 and 1977. It made sense to shift the focus away from the actual chocolate, of which there was inevitably going to be a lot less, and onto the exotic innards. And innards didn’t come more exotic than 1970s innards, with Cadbury leading the way. Things started off simply with the self-explanatory Oranges and Lemons (‘a happy new taste in filled blocks!’). Chips of various types were added: Crunchie pieces in Golden Crisp, mint shards in the well-loved Ice Breaker. A spate of Wild West branding came along (as it did to most snack foods at the time, for some reason). The gingham-clad raisin and biscuit slab Country Style was promoted with a sharpshooting variation on Spot the Ball, and Gold Mine – a Golden Crisp but with slightly smaller Crunchie chunks – carried on the frontier theme. They got more geographically adventurous with the Cadbury Classic range, featuring the tangy Ginger bar, the orange- and curaçao-steeped Grand Seville, and the papaya-stuffed Tropical Fruit. The other houses followed suit. In all, over forty-four new chocolate bars were introduced during the decade. Thirty were swiftly withdrawn, but that’s still not a bad hit rate.

      Short and sweet. Cadbury’s Ice Breaker, circa 1973, and Gold Mine (1975) shared a brittle heart and an all-too brief shelf life.

      Terry’s upmarket range was called Royal Gold. Coffee, lime, Turkish delight and marzipan temptingly resided within the shiniest of wrappers. They even broke up a bar, wrapping each tablet individually, packaging the lot back together again in slab form and calling it, for reasons obscure, the Oliver Twist. Nestlé, meanwhile, artfully dodged controversy by producing the reliably posh Superfine and Coffee Cream, with an occasional luxury item flourish, such as the muesli-adorned Alpine bar. Rowntree, by comparison, kept oddly quiet – Yorkie aside – during this product deluge. They scored an early winner with Mint Cracknel, a bar whose intriguing spun sugar centre was made in roughly the same way as nylon thread – as indeed was the facial hair of its on-screen representative, Noel Edmonds.

      Terry’s, employing neon-handwriting style logos to full effect in the futuristic ‘80s with Bitz (1983) and Dark circa 1982.

      If diversity was the watchword in the 1970s, the following decade was all about consolidation. Cadbury rebuilt their own image behind Dairy Milk (which, from 1985, went king size, along with everything else). They reintroduced dormant varieties like roast almond and sultana, and added the odd new bar like ‘when milk and plain collide’ peculiarity Gambit, but the main draw was increasingly Cadbury themselves, embracing the ‘80s corporate brand mania like an old hand. Terry’s, meanwhile, embraced the decade’s other nascent trend, graphic design, to jazz up the wrappers of their crispy chip Bitz range. As with nearly all design of this vintage, what started off looking like something from a millionaire’s pleasure palace in the Caribbean soon acquired the air of a Dunstable nightclub’s ladies night flyer. More sure-footed was Logger, a standard segmented bar cunningly disguised as a tree, and advertised with a shameless Monty Python lumberjack sketch homage. Such visual depreciation was common by now, and everyone soon learned that strong, traditional lines suited them best. Combine this with a fashion for corporate takeovers within the industry, and the seemingly endless variety of the 1970s chocolate market seemed to thin out drastically after 1990. Rowntree were subsumed by Nestlé, Terry’s by Kraft. Cadbury circled their wagons ever tighter, badging everything under the Dairy Milk label, while Mars continued to parry them with Galaxy. The shelves that had once heaved with wrappers of all hues and designs now bore endless ranks of relentlessly focus-grouped purple and brown. No more would entire lines be rebranded on the whim of a shop girl from Plymouth. This made sound business sense, but some of the fun had been let out, children of the future denied the Dickensian pleasure of bursting into a sweet shop and asking for ‘an Oliver Twist, two Tiffins and a Big Wig, please!’.

      Come up to the lab and see what’s in the slab. Cadbury’s Gambit (1967), Nestle’s Feast circa 1974, Dairy Crunch (1965), Hazel Nut circa 1975, and Fizz Bang (1980); Cadbury-Fry’s Tiffin (1967).

BRANDED FOR LIFE

      Wonderful as chocolate is, there’s a limit to what you can do with a bar of it. Bung in a fruity filling here, sling some hazelnuts at it from over there, wrap it round a bit of frothy nougat... there are other options, but most of those risk a custodial sentence. As the big chocolate companies of the land expanded and consolidated, they found these tired old tricks, most of them dating from before the war, weren’t giving them the brand range their national status required. So, if you can’t jigger up the contents, why not play about with the shape? This had been going on since the start of the century, with the likes of Fry’s Five Boys, a weird little bar decorated with the gurning expressions of one Lindsay Poulton, supposedly to demonstrate the tortuous emotional states gone through by the average small boy awaiting his cocoa fix.

      Everyone knows his name – Rupert, Rupert the bar (1971).

      Such high-concept wrapper action had no place in the modern chocolate era, though. Three simple pack-festooning candidates ruled the shelves: wacky cartoon animals, famous folk from the cinema and telly, and famous wacky cartoon animals from the cinema and telly. In 1970 Nestlé launched the Winnie the Pooh chocolate bar: bog-standard milk chocolate, but with a variety of characters from Disney’s recent A.A. Milne revamp on the labels. The sheer cross-media crowd-pleasing of this sort of thing was too good to do just the once, so over the next couple of years they pulled the same trick with The Aristocats, Robin Hood and the ever-collectable Doctor Who. When the chocolate ran out, the endorsements didn’t. The Pink Panther bar, a slab of strawberry-flavoured... stuff decorated with everyone’s favourite slightly camp gentleman, scholar and acrobat, was the first and most memorable of these (even if some of those memories come with a slightly suspicious aftertaste). Others included a cream-flavour Star Trek bar (‘She cannae taste any blander, Cap’n!’) and various Tom and Jerry concoctions, including a banana variant.

      Chasing the pink pound – Nestle’s Pink Panther (1972).

      BBC children’s programmes, as a rule, weren’t up for this sort of treatment, though since many were produced by third parties who kept merchandising rights close to their chests, there wasn’t a lot the Beeb could do if, say, FilmFair decided to let Chocolat Tobler launch a range of bars named after (but, crucially, not flavoured with) The Herbs. And if they then went off to Nestlé and got them to make Paddington Bear and Wombles chocolate, well, there wasn’t much Chocolat Tobler could do about that, either. Canny do-it-yourself cartoon maker Bob Godfrey similarly played the percentages, licensing Roobarb chocolate to Cadbury and the later Noah and Nelly bar franchise to Nestlé. It was every furry stop-motion animal for himself. Oliver Postgate, needless to say, kept well away from this sort of thing.

      TV hits! Doctor Who (1971/3), Mr Men circa 1977, and The Wombles circa 1976, sell out in the name