British chocoholics have not been happy since the American company Kraft bought Cadbury in 2010. They’ve expressed displeasure with a variety of offenses, including a factory shutdown, the new shape of the brand’s iconic Dairy Milk chocolate bars, and a decision by Mondelez (the candy business that Kraft spun off in 2012 and left in charge of the Cadbury brand) to quit giving Christmas gifts to Cadbury pensioners.
Now they have a new gripe, tied to changes made to the Cadbury Creme Eggs that hatch for Easter.
With varying degrees of indignation, newspapers in the UK reported that the fondant-stuffed chocolate eggs are no longer held together (paywall) by a shell of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate, and that cartons that formerly held six-packs of eggs now nest only five. The Telegraph went so far this morning as to include the recipe change in a list of six ways in which the Cadbury brand “has been trashed,” and WalesOnline.com quotes a consumer who has accused the candy company of “ruining Easter.”
A Mondelez spokeswoman confirms that the recipe for the eggs produced and sold in the UK has been changed from Dairy Milk Chocolate to “standard, traditional Cadbury milk chocolate.” Some might find such a change worthy of little more than a shrug; others have felt compelled to comment on the product’s own Facebook page, which has received comments such as this:
Thanks, Kraft, for ruining Creme Eggs—they now taste like any other generic chocolate egg… I only liked them with the Dairy Milk. No more for me! Oh, and I shan’t be buying any of your other ‘chocolate’ either!
We haven’t tasted the new egg, so it’s unclear to us how different they might be—and indeed some might question whether they were any good in the first place. But the sheer act of Mondelez co-opting and tinkering with a classic British treat is enough to stoke anger; our attachment to brands is a powerful thing.