Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (14 page)

Through his friendship with Henry Nestlé, Daniel Peter began to see an opportunity. It occurred to him that his chocolate products and Henri Nestlé’s technology for creating powdered milk might be combined to create a creamy milk chocolate drink. After all, people were accustomed to mixing cocoa powder with milk or water to make a beverage. So why not mix the two directly to form a ready-made milk chocolate powder. And why stop at a drink? If milk and chocolate could be combined into a solid tablet or bar, it would be far sweeter and smoother than the slightly bitter dark chocolates on the market.

From his small warehouse by the lakeside, Daniel Peter experimented with adding Nestlé’s dried milk to cocoa and sugar. After his
initial optimism, he hit upon a problem. When cocoa was combined with Nestlé’s milk powder, the resulting drink was coarse and grainy. Yet when he processed the milk himself, the water in the milk did not blend well with the oil in the cocoa bean. In addition, the water reacted with the sugar to alter the texture. He had to find a way to dry the milk without spoiling it.

Peter became obsessed with the challenge. His plant was open round the clock; he made his dark chocolate confections during the day, and at night he experimented with different ratios of milk powder and cocoa powder. Friends told him it was impossible. The water in the milk would never mix with the fat in the cocoa bean. He could afford only one member of staff, apart from his wife. Using very basic water-powered machines, he tried every variation of evaporating the water from the milk before blending it with the chocolate. At one stage he thought he had succeeded. “I was happy,” he said later, “but a few weeks later as I examined the contents an odor of bad cheese or rancid butter came to my nose. I was desperate, but what was I to do?” Whether using milk or milk powder, the chocolate was a gritty, gravely pulp, best consumed quickly before it turned rancid. “I did not lose courage,” he said, “but continued to work as long as circumstances allowed.”

Meanwhile, Henri Nestlé’s company continued to grow. By 1871 around 1,000 yellow cans rolled off his production line each day. Three years later, the number had risen to half a million cans of infant cereal a year that were being sold on five continents. With all the problems of manufacture, distribution, shipping, and sales, managing the firm was becoming too demanding for Nestlé, who was approaching sixty. In 1875 he sold his company for one million Swiss francs to a Swiss businessman, who bought everything, including the rights to Nestlé’s name. One of the witnesses to the sale was Henri’s friend and neighbor, Daniel Peter.

Henri Nestlé understood the difficulties of managing the production of milk products in bulk and advised his struggling friend to approach his leading competitor, the Anglo Swiss Condensed Milk Company, which had found a way to mass-produce condensed milk.

If Peter started with condensed milk, there would be less water to evaporate, and it might prove easier to remove the excess with the technology he had.

Peter set out to meet with the managers at Anglo Swiss. It appears that he was reluctant to reveal too much of his new idea. He was making “a new product for which I am sure there will soon exist great demand,” he said, adding that it was in their mutual interest for him “to order the milk I need from you.” But when he repeated his experiments, adding condensed milk to the cocoa powder, sugar, and cocoa butter, the result, although improved, was still not reliable. So Peter created a special “drying room,” where the milk and chocolate mixture was turned into flakes, spread on trays, and heated still further. Finally, in 1875, he hit upon a formula that produced a silky smooth chocolate. It was the world’s first ready-made milk chocolate drink, and he called it Chocolats au Lait Gala Peter.

The latter part of the nineteenth century was the heyday of English tourism in Switzerland. It was common practice for the wealthy to send their daughters to Swiss finishing schools or to take a tour of the Alps for the spectacular scenery. One English grocer who made his way to Vevey was so struck by the new product that he placed an order for one hundred pounds of milk chocolate to try back home. Vevey was also on the route of the Orient Express. Soon Peter’s invention, in its colorful copper wrapper, was making its way east.

Daniel Peter seized every opportunity to promote his new product. In 1878 he took his invention to the International Exhibition in Paris, organized to celebrate France’s recovery after the Franco-Prussian War. The largest exhibition ever held, it attracted 13 million visitors over several months, many of them from across the Channel. A world of wonders awaited inspection, including strange novelties like Graham Bell’s telephone and Thomas Edison’s megaphone. Among such feats of ingenuity was Le Premier des Chocolats au Lait, the new chocolate drink emblazoned with a gratifying Silver Award. Daniel Peter had arrived.

Better still, the English loved his milk chocolate, allowing Peter to dream of a secure future. “If a town of 8,000 inhabitants can consume more than 100 pounds in a year,” he calculated, “then the six
million inhabitants of London could easily consume 40 tons.” Full of enthusiasm, the inventor of milk chocolate set off to England. He wanted to challenge the Quaker firms and their pure dark cocoas with his sweeter, milkier brand. And why stop there? Was there a future, he wondered, in turning his novelty drink into a solid form for enjoyment as a milk chocolate bar?

Peter’s breakthrough milk chocolate drink was swiftly followed by another Swiss technical advance. One hundred kilometers from Vevey, in the town of Berne, was a small water mill run by an aspiring chocolatier named Rodolphe Lindt. Lindt had trained as a confectioner and was keen to try his hand at creating chocolate.

According to one probably apocryphal story, Rodolphe Lindt, the gentleman entrepreneur, had a greater appreciation for the pleasures of life than dedicating himself to the hard disciplines of business. On one occasion, he left for his weekend entertainment in such a hurry, he failed to stop his roller grinder. Consequently the roller pressed the beans for a full three days.

On Monday morning, when he entered his factory, he found that the resulting mixture, far from being ruined, was silken and smooth. Pounded and churned to an exquisitely fine texture, the result was an irresistible velvety chocolate rich with subtle aromas. Whether Lindt’s famous recipe really had its origins in a happy accident is not known, but there is no doubt that the bon vivant was soon experimenting with a unique method of preparing chocolate.

After consultations with his brother, August, a pharmacist, he tried variations in temperature and timing to see which yielded the best results and enabled him to fold extra cocoa butter into the mix. Cocoa butter, unlike other fats, melts at body temperature. After several days, folding in as much cocoa butter as possible, Lindt found he had a rich velvet chocolate that could melt in the mouth. Encouraged by the
possibilities, he developed a special machine that he called a conch, due to its shell-like shape. It was a wrought-iron trough, firmly embedded in a granite base, with sides that curved inwards to prevent spills. A heavy granite roller attached to a steel arm passed repeatedly back and forth over the chocolate paste. As the chocolate slapped against the sides of the trough and over the granite rollers that drew air into the mix, it became lighter, airier, finer, and more liquid. After three days of “conching,” Lindt found still more cocoa butter could be folded into the mix, making the chocolate silky smooth. He proudly called it his
Chocolat Fondant
.

Another benefit of conching was that it facilitated the manufacturing process. Rather than creating a solid dough that was hard to press into the molds, Lindt could simply pour his liquid chocolate into molds to set. A dark chocolate bar was no longer a gritty and toffee-like substance that just might break your teeth. The news spread fast among the genteel ladies in the nearby finishing schools at Berne and Neuchâtel, who sampled the results of his experiments, Rodolphe Lindt’s fondant “could melt in the mouth.”

Surprisingly, Lindt was in no hurry to exploit his chocolate speciality. Without a sales team, he relied on word of mouth to promote his product, and local connoisseurs were eager to test this new sensory delight. Across town in Berne, Jean Tobler was impressed with Lindt’s chocolate and tried to create something similar for his own shop, the
Confiserie Speciale
. It proved hard to fathom the key to Lindt’s success, so Tobler approached him directly in the hopes of joining forces. News of the breakthrough spread to other Swiss chocolate entrepreneurs, such as Philippe Suchard, who had opened sweetshops in Serrières, Lörrach, and Neuchâtel. The Sprüngli family, owners of a successful chocolate business in Zurich, were equally amazed at the quality of chocolate produced by such a novice. All the Swiss firms were keen to crack his formula.

But Rodolphe Lindt was so determined to safeguard the secrets of his unique conching process that he installed his new technology in a separate building. The machinery was protected as though it were the Crown Jewels. The key that guarded it was guarded itself. The
fabled recipe that had apparently come into being by a careless accident was firmly locked in the mind of Rodolphe Lindt.

Switzerland was fast establishing a reputation as the land of chocolate. Both Rodolphe Lindt and Daniel Peter had created recipes that set them apart. Recipes so mouthwatering they could destroy a rival—not just in Switzerland but across the continent. And after several trips to England, Peter had no doubt that there was an appreciative foreign market waiting for his wonderful new milk chocolate invention—especially in Britain’s booming industrial cities.

In England, George Cadbury, like his older brother, Richard, was more focused on his ideals than the competition. He loathed the fast-growing slums and the dark and ugly spread of industrialization over unspoiled countryside. Why, he asked, should progress and the “triumph of machinery” lead to a reduction in quality of life? “Machinery,” he declared, “creates wealth but destroys men.”

George and Richard saw the mean slum dwellings as a cause of workers’ continuing misery, driving them to drink to escape the squalor of their lives. They saw the very worst of it in Birmingham firsthand through their work for the Adult School movement. Before the Education Act of 1870, there was no compulsory elementary education, and the vast majority of adults in the slums were illiterate. The aim of the Adult Schools was to help them learn to read and write.

Every Sunday from the age of twenty, George rose early to ride to one of the roughest districts at Severn Street to meet the other teachers before school started at 7:00 AM. The dedication of his fellow teachers proved an inspiration. The former mayor of Birmingham and a Quaker, William White, taught every week at the Adult School until his death at the age of eighty. On one occasion, George
learned that seventy-five-year-old William White had walked “a mile and half through untrodden drifts of snow up to two feet depth” to get to his class on time.

The pupils were equally inspiring. They emerged from the slums, the drinking houses, even the prison gate. Any absentees were invariably routed out by a party of former thieves and drunks who knew their way around the vicious gangland of dark alleys and hovels in the slums. From a life of rags and filth and poverty, they came to learn and to escape the badge of failure and desperation that went with illiteracy. George’s class size swelled to three hundred students, and he taught more than 4,000 men over a period of fifty years.

For those who stayed the course, there were rewards. One woman rose during George’s lesson and declared she had had “more happiness in the one year since her husband joined the class than she had had in the twenty-nine years of her married life before.” This kind of experience fuelled George’s conviction that the best way to improve a man’s lot is to raise his ideals. But how, he reasoned, “can a man cultivate ideals when his home is a slum and his only place of recreation is a public house?” George and Richard knew that the adults in their classes were tyrannized by “the sweater, the rack renter and the publican”—the unscrupulous employers of sweated labor, overcharging landlords, and managers of public houses who exploited people’s addictions and helped to drive them to ruin. Their outspoken opposition to these groups made them enemies. “It is unreasonable,” George declared at a meeting in Manchester, “to expect a man to lead a healthy, holy life in a back street or a sunless slum.” Was it necessary, he continued, that the factory system should “narrow the lives” of the workers to such an extent, “belittling and oppressing” them with hideous conditions of life? But since it was clear that the factory system was there to stay, secured by the country’s growing prosperity, what was the solution?