Another attraction of sugar has been the low-cost approach to marketing. Pez, one of the original interactive candies, has never engaged in marketing since the company first introduced plastic dispensers to sell coloured candy bricks in the 1950s. Pez remains one of the industry’s top sellers. “Sugar candy has been around forever and candy stores have been around forever,” says Sean McCann, president of Sugar Mountain, another candy store chain with outlets in Toronto and Vancouver. “It’s the candy that sells.” Still, there are signs that this too is changing.
An estimated 250 new sugar products appear on store shelves every year. And recipes seem to call for more: more sour, more colourful, more interactive. More than 90 percent of the new entrants will disappear within two years. Novelty candies and candies linked to popular culture will dissolve even faster.
“There’s always a risk with products tied to a movie or other piece of popular culture,” a marketing representative at Topps points out. “But it can deliver a big bang if timed right.” To reduce the risk, manufacturers such as Cadbury Trebor Allan will use licensees for promotional work as opposed to launching new products.
Cadbury Trebor Allan has used hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and basketball great Shaquille O’Neal to promote Mr. Big. More recently, the company used Toronto Raptors star Vince Carter to act as a spokesman for several brands in Canada and the United States, where the company sells approximately 40 percent of its candy.
There are also signs that Canada’s sugar candy industry is taking marketing to the next level, which will include radio and television spots.
Werther’s Original butterscotch drops was one of the first sugar confections to realize the potential of television. “Almost overnight they turned the candy into a huge brand with a big following,” says Sullivan. “Television is the next step. In the U.S. most of the major companies have sugar confectionery advertising on TV.”
And what are Canada’s sugar candymakers likely to push? Suckers are enormous, according to Topps. That category has been redefined by the return of the Chupa Chup.
While kids will continue to drive the sale of sugar candy, the size of the retro market cannot be dismissed, although most candymakers insist it is the by-product of a healthy industry. “We don’t target nostalgia,” Nestlé’s insists.
Concord’s Paul Cherrie argues that as an overarching trend, the retro market will fade, but that should not hurt manufacturers with established brands. “Confectionery really is a category that transcends age barriers. Our core market does not remember what retro is.”
2
The History of Chocolate
“If one swallows a cup of chocolate only three hours after a copious lunch, everything will be perfectly digested and there will still be room for dinner.”
Brillat Savarin
Colourfully wrapped chocolate bars line store candy displays. Ice-cold chocolate milk is stocked in supermarket refrigerators, while higher end chocolatiers such as Laura Secord and Godiva sell eight out of every ten fancy boxes of chocolates in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Mother’s Day.
Chocolate is the world’s favourite flavour. It is also one of the world’s most global food products. Cultivated in the New World and transported to the Old, the chocolate we enjoy today has been influenced by over five centuries of innovation and refinement in many countries, including Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and England—and, to a lesser extent, the United States and even Canada.
Yet the origins of chocolate are planted exclusively in the temperamental roots of the Theobroma cacao. The tree was named in 1753 by Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, who found the Old World’s initial name for the plant, cacao, or chocolate tree, too vulgar. Von Linné preferred instead to respect the tree’s New World roots by combining the Greek theos, or god, with broma, or beverage.1
Over the years, the Old World appears to have won out as the name Theobroma cacao has been simplified to the more manageable “cacao tree.” But the name is the only thing that is simple about this complex tree. To produce its harvest, the cacao tree must be grown in moist and humid climates, no further than twenty degrees longitude on either side of the equator.
The first known use of the cacao bean occurred in the fourth century, immediately south of present-day Mexico, amid the inspiring stone temple cities of what is often referred to as the Mayan empire. The empire can be more accurately described as a group of Mayan states, sharing a similar culture and little else, that stretched from the Yucatán peninsula to the Pacific coast of Guatemala.
The Mayan culture is widely considered to be the greatest civilization of the original cultures. Known as “people of the book,” the Mayans could write of their art and culture, including the use of the valuable cacao bean.
“The bean was so highly valued, that it was used as a form of currency at a fixed market rate,” wrote the New Internationalist in an in-depth feature on the cocoa chain. “You could get a rabbit for ten beans, a slave cost a hundred and a prostitute went from eight to ten according to how they agree.”
The valuable cacao bean was also used by Mayan priests to create a thick spicy chocolate drink known as chocolatl. Cacao was considered to be a symbol of both fertility and prosperity. The “drink of the gods” produced from the bean was used to solemnize sacred rituals and was consumed by Mayan elite, who often contained their chocolate in magnificent pottery cylinders.
As with chocolate today, the Mayans did not have just one drink recipe. Ingredients such as porridge, gruel, and spices (including chili) were carefully added to create different tastes and textures.
The Mayans were also aggressive traders. As a result, chocolate had already spread north to the Aztec Empire of central Mexico by the time the Mayan civilization began to crumble in the ninth century. The frugal Aztecs used the cacao bean as currency, using beans to prepare chocolatl only when the commodity had become so worn that it could no longer be traded.
Once again, the consumption of chocolate was considered a luxury restricted to Aztec kings, noblemen, and the upper ranks of the priesthood, although chocolate was also given to warriors because of its energy-boosting properties.
According to American historian William Hickling, Emperor Montezuma of Mexico refused any beverage other than chocolatl, which he consumed in goblets before entering his harem, likely contributing to the belief that the drink was also an aphrodisiac. The Emperor is reported to have consumed up to 50 cups of chocolatl a day.
Christopher Columbus tasted the drink in 1502 but was largely unimpressed. Spanish explorer and conqueror Hernán Cortés was quick to recognize the value the Aztecs placed on cacao beans in 1519. He established cacao plantations around the Caribbean and returned to Spain in 1528 with a cargo of beans, an Aztec recipe, and the instruments for preparing the native drink.
Chocolatl predates the arrival of coffee and tea in Europe by more than eighty years. And it was in Spain that the drink would undergo its first major innovation. Early acceptance of the New World drink within the Spanish political and cultural elite was decidedly mixed. One individual described the bitter-tasting liquid as better fit for pigs than for people.
Nevertheless, enthusiasm for the beverage could not be contained, especially after the Spanish emperor sweetened the drink with cane sugar, vanilla, and even wine. For the next century, Spanish clergy would continue to refine the drink with nuts, powdered flowers, orange water, and recently discovered spices and sugar from the Orient.