Apart from installing a steam engine to grind the cocoa beans, Joseph Storrs Fry received a patent from George III to build a new kind of machine to roast them, which he installed in the factory next door. Doubtless he was gratified to find The Times full of praise on 8 August 1801 for the ‘excellent articles produced from his celebrated manufactory’. By the time George Cadbury’s father was opening his tea and chocolate shop in Birmingham in 1824, the Frys were using nearly 40 per cent of the cocoa imported into Britain, and their annual sales had risen to £12,000.
Fry’s grinding machines.
In 1835 the business passed to the third generation of Frys. Brothers Joseph II, Francis and Richard continued to develop the site on Union Street, and pioneered new brands. They launched Pearl Cocoa, which countered the heavy oiliness of the cocoa drinks of the time with the addition of arrowroot, which absorbed the oils. Since Pearl Cocoa also contained less costly ingredients like molasses and sugar, it could be cheaply priced to attract poorer households, and became a huge seller. Homeopathic Cocoa took advantage of the burgeoning interest in health. For the upmarket consumer the Fry brothers introduced a finely ground Soluble Cocoa which was slightly less gritty. All these products could be sold for a fraction of what it cost to manufacture them a hundred years earlier, when a pound of their grandfather’s best cocoas cost over seven shillings, almost as much as the average farm worker received for his weekly wage. These new variations cost around one shilling per pound, while the Frys’ workers were paid ten shillings per week.
The Fry family was noted not only for its innovation, but also for the austerity of its Quaker founders. One worker from the mid-nineteenth century recalled ‘primitive and paternalistic’ conditions: ‘The quiet of Union Street was even more marked between 9.00 to 9.20 when all employees attended a morning meeting. It was not uncommon to see passers stop to listen admiringly to the peaceful strains of a hymn sung by our girls and workmen as a prelude to the working day.’
As Richard and George Cadbury were struggling to establish their firm in Birmingham during the 1860s, according to Fry’s Works Magazine, ‘so great had become the expansion of our trade’ that the factory was inadequate to deal with the ‘orders pouring into the House from every quarter’. At a time when the Cadbury brothers were just beginning to recruit travellers to support Dixon Hadaway, Fry’s travellers reached across England. George learned that a single Fry traveller with a flair for sales managed to secure ninety-five accounts in just four towns: Cheltenham, Stroud, Worcester and Gloucester. Gloucester alone bought £10,000 of Fry’s goods. In the age of the steamship, the Frys also benefited from the Bristol docks that linked the company to Britain’s burgeoning Empire and an ever-expanding horizon. To cap it all, they took advantage of Bristol being a leading naval base and won a contract to supply the British Navy – almost doubling their orders overnight. For the military, cocoa was valuable because it was easy to transport in tins, and was warm and filling for the troops.
From the Cadbury brothers’ loss-making warehouse in Birmingham, the Frys must have appeared invincible. George knew he had a great deal to learn, and travelling with Francis James Fry gave him the chance to find out more about their latest pioneering inventions.
In 1847 the Fry brothers had introduced a novelty into the Victorian market. They had experimented with mixing their cocoa powder with its by-product, the excess cocoa fat. Whether by accident or design, they hit upon a way of blending the two ingredients with sugar to make a rich creamy paste. This concoction was then pressed into a mould and left to set. The result was the first solid chocolate bar in Britain. It was a breakthrough: a way of mass-producing a chocolate product that could be eaten instead of being consumed as a drink. This made chocolate portable, and turned it into a totally new kind of snack that could be carried on a railway journey or taken to work. They called it Chocolat Délicieux à Manger.
Fry’s new product held no excitement for those with a really sweet tooth. It was bitter, coarse and heavy, and probably only of interest to the dedicated few who also possessed a strong jaw. Initially sales were slow. Undeterred, the Fry brothers had glimpsed a sweeter, more solid future. They set to work on more recipes for chocolate confectionery that could be produced in bulk. Secretly they experimented with a new kind of white minty cream. This was made by boiling sugar in an open pan, whipping it to an opaque creamy consistency and adding mint flavourings to give it a fresh taste. After the minty cream had cooled and been cut into sticks, these were dipped in luxurious dark chocolate. By 1853, Fry’s frock-coated travellers were opening their sample cases to reveal a brand new product: Fry’s delectable chocolate-coated Cream Sticks. Shopkeepers were amazed when they tasted the first chocolate confectionery produced on a factory scale; it was rich and Christmassy, a real treat. Better still, mass production meant that the price was significantly lower than that of hand-made confections.
The recipe proved to be a success, and within a few years the Cream Sticks were reformulated as a new type of chocolate bar. The chocolate for these ‘morsels of delight’, as they were called in Fry’s literature, was formed into a thin, light paste. The mint cream was set in hundreds of tiny moulds and taken to covering rooms, where ‘scores of young damsels’ with chocolate trays coated the batches. In 1866 the first wagonloads of Fry’s Chocolate Cream found their way to the grocers and sweet shops of Victorian Britain. Preliminary sales of Fry’s minty chocolate sensation may have been modest, but there was growing interest – and not just from British customers.
French chocolatiers, who had long had a reputation for exquisite hand-made confections, were also exploring ways to produce them in bulk. Just outside Paris at his chocolate works on the River Marne in Noisiel, Émile Menier hit upon a process not dissimilar to Fry’s. He had inherited his business from his father, a chemist, who had originally used cocoa sweetened with sugar as a coating for his pills. Émile Menier developed the cocoa side of his father’s business, and by the mid-nineteenth century he had created a method for pressing dark chocolate into a mould. Eye-catchingly wrapped in chrome-yellow paper, it was the first solid chocolate bar manufactured in France, and it proved so successful that Menier’s output quadrupled in ten years, reaching almost 2,500 tons in the mid-1860s, a quarter of the country’s total output. Émile was able to invest more funds in his factory. Originally powered by a humble watermill, it was now equipped with shining new steam turbines, creating such a splendid spectacle that the locals called it ‘the cathedral’. Much of Menier’s chocolate was exported, and like many European manufacturers, he had his eye on the large populations of Britain’s industrial towns. Soon he was in a position to open a factory in Southwark Street in London.
To improve the texture of his chocolate and increase his production, Menier needed extra cocoa butter, the fatty part of the bean. He found a supplier in Weesp, near Amsterdam, where a cocoa-making family firm was run by Coenraad van Houten. Van Houten had managed to solve a problem that had eluded everyone else: how to mechanise the separation of the fat content from the rest of the cocoa bean, which produced cocoa butter as a by-product. As a result his cocoa was purer and more refined than anything else on the market. Exactly how he achieved this was a trade secret, but there was no secret about his sales: his agents were acquiring customers in London, Edinburgh and Dublin.
As a regular visitor to London, George Cadbury could not fail to notice the new products that were becoming available: a purer form of cocoa made by the Dutch, and eating chocolate manufactured as solid bars in bulk. In the 1860s sales of eating-chocolate in England were modest – nothing compared to the established drinking-cocoa brands. Even so, like a flag planted on new territory beating against the wind, they pointed the way to unlock