Bitter Chocolate (8 page)

In 1828, Van Houten showed up at the patent office in Amsterdam, registered his revolutionary cocoa-processing method and took a well-deserved place in the history of chocolate. It was the first major improvement in the preparation of cocoa in nearly three thousand years, and it would soon take the little bean to the forefront of world confection. Van Houten also established the Netherlands as the leading cocoa powder producer in the world, aided by the fact that Holland possessed one of the best sources of raw material.

The Dutch were aggressive international traders: they had cornered the world's tea production through the East India Company; they controlled the Spice Islands; and now the West Indian subsidiary of their principal trading company monopolized
the market for the high-quality Criollo beans coming out of their own New World colonies in Venezuela.

The Dutch had the same source of labour as all the other cocoa-growing settlements. Whether it was the British in the Caribbean, the Spanish in Guatemala or the Portuguese in Brazil, the common denominator in cocoa economics was slavery. And it would become an even more important factor as the demand for cocoa-based products caught on and spread throughout the vast and expanding working classes of Europe, Britain and North America. Slavery, as a moral issue, mattered only to a relatively small group of human rights activists. Ironically, some of the most influential people in this tiny movement were also building industries—and fortunes—based on slavery.

The Quakers had their own historical experience with persecution and discrimination. They'd been excluded from most of the privileges of British society since their sect was founded in the seventeenth century. First established as the Religious Society of Friends, they claimed to need no intermediary to witness their relationship with God but instead were guided by an “inward light” supplied by the Holy Spirit. They refused to attend the Church of England or to pledge oaths to the British Crown, and, as pacifists, they would not bear arms. Britain barred them from attending universities and owning land. In the seventeenth century, British monarchs imprisoned or banished thousands of them. Large numbers of Quakers fled England for the colonies, the most famous being the followers of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania.

By the nineteenth century, Britain had finally relaxed its persecution of those who were not members of the official church. Quakers in England assimilated to some degree—though the society remained tightly knit—and they took an active interest
in politics and social reform. Quakers were industrious and successful entrepreneurs. And they took a particular interest in chocolate.

Cocoa was regarded by nineenth-century society as an innocent pleasure, a non-alcoholic stimulant. While abstemious themselves, the Quakers hadn't entirely avoided the booze business. For generations, they had justified production of beer and ale on the grounds that these were acceptable alternatives to the potent rum and gin favoured by hard-drinking Brits in their raucous taverns. Like many moralists, the members were capable of pragmatic rationalizing, a trait that would serve some enterprising members well in the chocolate business.

When it first arrived in Europe, chocolate was considered a wholesome food with medicinal value, and so it was that a Quaker medical doctor in Bristol named Joseph Fry set up his own healthful chocolate-making company in the early 1700s. The doctor's grandson took the operation one step further, figuring out how to mass-produce cocoa powder by hitching together the Dutch invention of Coenraad Van Houten with the Englishman Thomas Watt's revolutionary innovation, the steam engine. The offspring was a steam-powered hydraulic press that revolutionized the business and turned the Fry family enterprise into a business empire. But that was only the start.

Van Houten's machine had been inspired by his determination to produce the finest possible form of dry chocolate powder. The residue—that unappetizing cocoa butter—became a useless by-product. But Fry and his family found a purpose for it. By blending small amounts of melted, clarified cocoa butter with cocoa solids—along with sugar and flavours—the company had a substance they could mould. Spanish monks had produced greasy little lumps of sweet chocolate to be eaten, while French shops turned out the dry, crumbly wafers and pastilles that the Marquis de Sade so piteously craved in his prison cell. This product of the Frys, however, was something new and
different: a melt-in-your-mouth treat that could be mass-produced and sold at an affordable price. It was, for all intents and purposes, the modern chocolate bar.

By the 1840s, the Frys were producing their famous Chocolat Délicieux à Manger—chocolate you could eat off the shelf. It didn't take long for the business to take off and J.S. Fry & Sons became the world's pre-eminent chocolate producers. But they soon had stiff competition—from other Quakers.

John Cadbury had just finished apprenticing as a tea dealer in Leeds at the age of twenty-two when he decided to set up a storefront business selling tea, coffee and chocolate in Birmingham, right next to his father's drapery shop. With start-up capital from his Quaker circle and help from his brother and nephews, Cadbury began to manufacture his own products from imported beans. By 1860, he was selling dozens of varieties of chocolate and cocoa drinks.

About that time, John's son, George Cadbury, made a fortuitous trip to Amsterdam, where he bought a Van Houten press. Soon after, the Cadburys were manufacturing their own high-quality Cocoa Essence powder, advertised as “Absolutely pure and therefore Best.”

Crude though the boast may sound, the Cadburys had discovered something more important than machinery. They were among the first in the business to display a formidable talent in marketing. The Cadburys produced the first boxes of chocolate bonbons, which were similar to the chocolate bars the Frys had invented but fashioned into bite-sized pieces and presented in pretty little containers decorated with saccharine images of small children and fluffy kittens. The clever packaging caught the sentimental fancy of Victorian consumers. The Cadburys also found a way to appeal to their ambiguous prudery, playing up the innocence of chocolate as a sensual indulgence. It was the firm's marketing genius that first made chocolate a part of Valentine's Day in Great Britian and a symbol of romantic love. In 1875, Cadbury
Brothers sold the first chocolate Easter egg. In one stroke, chocolate became an integral part of the most important celebration on the Christian calendar, a way to mark the end of Lenten sacrifice, a harbinger of spring.

For centuries, cocoa had been consumed to achieve a practical outcome: to increase energy, or to relieve constipation, or to stimulate sexual desire. Now it was pure pleasure, in and of itself. It just tasted good. It gratified the consumer. Naturally, other businessmen took note, and other companies provided competition. And they, like the Frys and Cadburys, were Quakers.

Joseph Rowntree grew up in the city of York, the son of a Quaker grocer with a strong social conscience. As a teenager studying in London, the young Rowntree became interested in politics and attended debates at the House of Commons. He returned to York to work with his father, but in 1869 he teamed up with his brother Henry at the family-run Cocoa, Chocolate and Chicory Works. It was still a small business when Henry died in 1883, but by the end of the nineteenth century—and with the new developments in chocolate candy-making—the factory employed four thousand people, manufacturing chocolate drops as well as Fruit Gums and Jelly Babies. But there was more to the Rowntree family than a business based on society's passion for sweets. They also had a passion for justice.

Joseph Rowntree was preoccupied for much of his life with trying to improve the lives of his employees. He provided a library in the factory and education for workers under the age of seventeen and also free medical and dentistry services and a pension fund—all unheard of in the England of sweatshops and indentured labour.

Joseph's son, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, went even further than his father. Not only was Seebohm working for the family
business in York, he was also Britain's first labour director. Seebohm wrote a number of influential studies on the conditions of Britain's workforce, including
Poverty: A Study of Town Life
, in which he argued that Britain had two kinds of poor people: working folk who couldn't earn enough to make ends meet; and those who earned enough but wasted it on wicked pursuits such as liquor. Seebohm lobbied on behalf of both groups while he endeavoured to put his moral principles to work on behalf of his employees. The Rowntrees became leaders in a movement promoted by a few of the better proprietors of the day: “paternalistic capitalism.”

Seebohm Rowntree and his fellow Quakers believed strongly in the Victorian notion that the road from poverty to wealth was open to anyone prepared to work hard and behave in a disciplined manner. Wealth was no longer strictly determined by bloodline. The market ruled, and the market was driven by unprecedented demand for a limitless range of goods at home and abroad. Capitalism and the social dislocations it engendered also bred overwhelming social problems. But the Rowntrees believed that the state had a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of those who would not—or could not—help themselves.

Seebohm Rowntree was among a group of moral businessmen who tried to lay the foundations for Britain's first welfare state. He lobbied government to establish a minimum wage and a system of family allowance payments for all British workers. He was active in the Liberal Party and argued that the appropriate seat of democratic power was the elected House of Commons and not the unelected House of Lords. And he went even further, creating a model community for his own workers at his chocolate factory in York, insisting on a clean, safe working environment. Seebohm believed the shop floor had greater impact on a person's life than the church. In the Chocolate Works, he established a democratic system for employees to choose their own managers and he insisted on rigorous timekeeping for shift workers and scheduled payment of salaries and benefits. The rights and
responsibilities of workers and their managers were declared by the company in writing.

Seebohm Rowntree was not the only paternalistic capitalist in the chocolate industry who dabbled in social engineering. Appalled by the general state of working conditions in nineteenth-century British factories, the Cadburys decided to move their operations from Birmingham to a greenfield “Factory in a Garden.” In 1878 the Cadburys bought four and a half acres of land in the countryside and began to build their community on the banks of the river Bourn, establishing a pretty little town they called Bournville.

The Cadburys' factory offered landscaped grounds with flowers and green spaces for relaxation, and a dining room with wholesome meals. The idyll on the banks of the Bourn was supposed to inspire employees and create a healthy atmosphere—notions that the Cadburys took from the “garden city” movement. According to the pioneering ideas of the nineteenth-century town planner Ebenezer Howard, the garden city was designed to bring together the best of urban and country life while offering employment to its citizens. While most so-called garden cities eventually became bedroom suburbs of larger urban centres, Bournville was considered a model of the concept, and is a tourist attraction to this day.

There was, of course, at the heart of all the idealism of Quaker cocoa barons, a heavy-handed moralism. Cadbury Brothers expected its workers to live by a strict moral code, to attend church and to conduct their lives properly. Couples received Bibles when they wed, and newly married women had to leave the factory so that they could raise their families. Pubs and drinking establishments were banned in Bournville.

The experiment seemed to work, at least from a commercial point of view. The Quakers came to dominate the chocolate industry, despite stiff competition from the rest of Europe. National policies helped. Great Britain encouraged trade by
lowering taxes on imported cocoa beans, and soon England was on the cutting edge of international chocolate manufacturing. They were producing the first affordable chocolate—no longer something for the elite.