A visit to the Cadbury factory – The sweetest place on Earth

Lying before me are stacks of gooey Creme Eggs at Cadbury’s gigantic shrine to chocolate… their intoxicating smell alone has my mouth salivating. “Welcome to the best room in the factory,” beams a Wonka-like Andrew Smith, as he commences my tour of the whirling automata that annually fire out 400 million of the distinctive egg-shaped chocolates in the company’s famous Bournville factory on the outskirts of Birmingham.

This moustachioed manufacturer has lovingly tended the sweet treat for the past decade and today is giving me a rare, behind-the-scenes insight to celebrate 200 years of the nation’s favourite chocolate factory.

It was in 1824 that John Cadbury opened his first shop in Bull Street, Birmingham. Amongst groceries, he sold cocoa and drinking chocolate, which he prepared himself using a pestle and mortar.

Now, Cadbury is preparing to celebrate this historic bicentennial on Monday.

“Let me show you the intricacies of our unique, very special product,” enthuses Andrew, bedecked in regulation factory hairnet, as the chocolate eggs jostle their way around an overhead track that rattles like some Victorian arcade.

Coils of coloured foil fly through vintage machinery and unfurl into the oncoming blitzkrieg of egg-sized chocolates, while tiny mechanised hands – like robotic Oompa Loompas – speed-wrap them in a rackety carousel at the rate of 50,000 an hour.

“Even now, after all these years, that still amazes me,” swoons Andrew, gazing at the synchronised wrapping machine.

After being graded like real eggs in a battery farm – a process that sees partially wrapped or squashed chocolates discarded – the survivors are rattled into boxes of 24, before being shrink-wrapped and heat-sealed.

Everything happens blisteringly fast because an army of lorries is waiting.

To cope with seasonal demand during the four-month-long Easter window, Andrew’s machines must work all year round to produce eye-popping quantities of this peculiarly English confection – the yellow in the ‘yolk’ of Creme Egg is actually a colouring, not a flavour, derived from paprika. “We can never make enough,” he adds proudly.

But if the long climb up through the factory floors to the Creme Egg room revealed 1970s Cadbury technology, downstairs the approach is decidedly twenty-first century. Here, in the basement nerve-centre of the factory, the hero of the business – large bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk, a brand going strong for 109 years – is being produced in industrial quantities by a machine that looks like it was designed to produce nuclear warheads, not chocolate.

Behind huge metal silo walls and past signs declaring wonders such as “Chocolate Making”, “Caramel depositor” and “Buttons (wet end)”, the bars are churned out 364 days a year, 24 hours a day. The only pause in the process, which produces nearly 3,000 tonnes of chocolate bars a week, comes on Christmas Day. Above our heads, a river of chocolate flows along a 20mm pipe.

This gorgeous, brown sugary lifeblood is being pumped 1.5 miles through the factory to be swirled with caramel or mixed with fruit and nut in bunkers elsewhere.

Behind plate glass walls, a handful of white-coated technicians survey the thrumming machines, with only a glimpse of the captive chocolate visible through tiny windows. Elsewhere, the complex ballet of wrapping and boxing is performed on a scale to suit a car manufacturer.

When the factory was built over the river Bourn in 1879, some 3,000 staff congregated in the factory’s now-empty corridors during shift changes.

Today, there is barely a soul to be seen and soon it will be the turn of Creme Egg to receive a major production upgrade.

Within five to 10 years, the whirling clatter of 40-year-old machines will be given the high-tech treatment, while some future Andrew Smith paces the empty hall by himself.

“The plan is to continue investment in Bournville,” enthuses manufacturing director Rob Williams, who uses a microphone to talk to me through a headset as we pace the factory in white astronaut shoes, plastic gloves and chemist-style gowns. He even gives me a special pen to use that is detectable on X-ray should a bit fall off into a vat of molten chocolate – although there’s not much chance of that.

“Our aim in Cadbury is that everything should be made here,” he explains.

The company came under fire in 2015 after it was revealed that production of some lines had been moved abroad, including to Poland.

This was despite assurances from US food giant Kraft, now Mondelez International, that its controversial £12billion takeover of Cadbury in January 2010 would not affect the firm’s 30,000 staff or investment in UK production. Today, all the core products are back being made in the UK.

“They have been repatriated,” a spokesman explains proudly. Perhaps it is the delicious aroma of chocolate that permeates the building, but everyone at Cadbury has an infectious joviality.

From the hot-shot nano-technologist who oversees the “top secret” micro-particle in Cadbury Dairy Milk that fools the mouth at melting point, to research and development director David Shepherd, who admits he has the best job in the world and “can’t live without Twirl” – the Flake with the chocolate coating. He’s not the only fan.

“You bring in the cashew nuts and the blueberries to work, and then think ‘I really want a Twirl’,” beams one young brand ambassador, who points out the staff shop where discounted chocolate is sold.

“Bournville is the chocolate centre of the globe,” declares David in the Victorian boardroom, where oil paintings of the illustrious Cadbury clan, including John’s sons Richard and George, who took over the business on their father’s retirement in 1861, gaze down on us like headmasters’ portraits at Hogwarts.

“When a product is in demand on the shelf for 20 years, you really feel you’ve made it, and there is no limit to our imagination. There is a bit of magic about Bournville but it’s not all Willy Wonka,” David adds, telling me his role requires insights into fields including packaging technology, consumer behaviour and even crop science. “After all, without cocoa, there will be no Cadbury,” he smiles.

Over the past 12 years, Mondelez has invested £272million in UK chocolate production. It has bought large machines, but also enabled archivist Sarah Foden, curator of Cadbury’s history for the past 35 years, to invest in a new archive.

Here, she reveals the original artwork produced by Richard Cadbury, whose lightbulb moment led to “chocolate box art”, the first example of which featured his own painting of his young daughter and her cat.

“Lots of other manufacturers were selling cocoa for drinking, but the Cadbury inheritance was finding a way to use the excess fat to produce high-end chocolate,” says Sarah.

“Chocolate wasn’t affordable for the mass market, so they chose a cheap cardboard box and launched Milk Tray in 1915 for the man in the street.”

The firm’s original Victorian staff were so well treated by social reformer George Cadbury that in 1879, he created Bournville, the 14-acre “Factory in a Garden”, believing workers should be surrounded by pleasant green spaces.

Indeed, both George and Richard were pioneers in employee welfare. Their initiatives included installing recreational facilities such as a cricket pitch, medical and dental departments, and setting up one of the UK’s first contributory pension funds. Bournville had a concert hall and every house was required to have a fruit tree in the front garden – a mandate that persists to this day.

But David Shepherd admits the firm’s chocolate inventions haven’t always worked. “I’ve had many failures with fruit-based chocolates in particular,” reveals the man who is proud to have invented the Brunch bar, a rectangular protein snack. “Orange always works, but I’ve always struggled with cranberries and apricots.”

And despite the intense focus groups and market research, there can still be surprises. “None of us knew just how big Jelly Popping Candy was going to be,” he says wistfully.

• Visit cadbury.co.uk/about/anniversary/200-years-of-cadbury