Chocolate’s Great Rivalries

It’s a bitter irony that one of the world’s sweetest delights has a history steeped in rivalry, intrigue, and ideological clashes. In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the eccentric Willy Wonka frets about spies sent by rival confectioners to steal his secrets. This whimsical plot was inspired by very real events: in Dahl’s schoolboy days, Britain’s top chocolate makers were known to infiltrate each other’s factories in a clandestine battle for sweet supremacy. For centuries, chocolate’s greatest innovations and most iconic brands have been driven by intense competition – sometimes friendly, sometimes ferocious – among visionary chocolatiers. From the genteel Quaker businessmen of Victorian England to the brash American moguls of the 20th century, the saga of chocolate’s evolution is a tale of bitter feuds, competing philosophies, and an unrelenting quest to conquer taste buds around the world.

The Quaker Origins of a Sweet Industry

The modern chocolate industry was born in an unlikely crucible of piety and social conscience. In the early 19th century, a group of British Quakers – families named Cadbury, Fry, and Rowntree – launched businesses to offer an alternative to the era’s real vice: alcohol. As devout Quakers barred from many professions, they turned to commerce, and cocoa was seen as a healthful, morally upright drink that could wean the working class off gin. In 1824, John Cadbury opened a small shop in Birmingham selling tea, coffee, and “drinking chocolate.” He and his fellow Quakers viewed business as a means to improve society. Profit was welcome, but ethical practices and charity were paramount. This noble outlook set the stage for a distinctly principled kind of corporate rivalry.

Cadbury’s early years were a struggle for purity in an age of adulteration. Some less scrupulous makers were bulking out cocoa powder with everything from ground brick to sawdust. Determined to offer a pure product, Cadbury championed quality even at higher cost. Likewise, in Bristol, the Fry family – another Quaker clan – had been grinding cocoa since the 1700s and shared these ethical standards. In 1847, Joseph Fry scored a breakthrough by producing the world’s first proper chocolate bar, blending cocoa powder, sugar, and cocoa butter into a solid confection. This was a milestone – chocolate was no longer just a drink. The race was on to develop new forms and flavors, and the Quaker chocolatiers led the charge.

Yet Quaker business rivalry was anything but cutthroat. The Cadburys, Frys, and another Quaker-founded firm, Rowntree’s of York, were part of a close-knit community. They attended the same meetings, sometimes intermarried, and even cooperated on big issues like campaigning against the use of slave labor on cocoa plantations. Still, in the marketplace they were fierce competitors, each striving to outdo the others with a better cocoa press or a smoother chocolate recipe. In the 1860s, Cadbury leapfrogged rivals by acquiring a revolutionary cocoa press invented by Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten. That press removed cocoa butter from the beans, yielding fine cocoa powder and paving the way for easily molded chocolate bars. Armed with this technology, Cadbury could make chocolate that was more consistent and silky than many competitors’ gritty concoctions. The Quaker brethren had no qualms “poaching” good ideas to gain an edge – always, of course, in service of quality and honesty.

By the late 19th century, Cadbury had emerged as a leader in the British market, renowned for pure cocoa and innovative products. One of their best-sellers was a simple box of chocolates called “Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence,” marketed with the slogan “Absolutely Pure – Therefore Best.” Over in York, the Rowntree company (founded in 1862 by Henry Rowntree) was up-and-coming, expanding from grocery goods into chocolate. Though sharing the Quaker ethos, Rowntree’s placed a greater emphasis on experimental new sweets and marketing flair. They launched pastilles, gums, and chocolate-covered biscuits, cultivating a reputation for creativity. Meanwhile, J.S. Fry & Sons in Bristol continued to develop their own chocolate brands, including the first mass-produced chocolate bar and later the iconic Fry’s Turkish Delight. A three-way rivalry was taking shape in Britain – fought not with dirty tricks (at least initially) but with the Quaker weapons of quality, integrity, and industrious innovation.

Model Villages and Moral Duty

What truly set apart these early chocolate enterprises was their competing philosophies about capitalism’s higher purpose. For the Cadbury brothers, George and Richard, selling chocolate was a means to a social end. In the 1870s, as their business prospered, they began planning a utopian factory town. In 1879 they acquired land near Birmingham and built Bournville, a bucolic village of neat red-brick houses, parks, and schools – all for their employees. It was a radical experiment in welfare capitalism. Good housing, sanitation, and education, they believed, would foster healthy, loyal workers and uplift working-class families. Bournville had no pubs (in keeping with temperance values) but offered sports facilities, gardens, and even its own train line into the city. The Cadburys’ paternalistic care for employees earned admiration far and wide. Their rival, Joseph Rowntree, pursued a similar path in York, developing garden suburbs and funding charitable trusts to tackle poverty. Across the Atlantic, these model villages would soon inspire a young American caramel maker named Milton Hershey – but more on him later.

Of course, altruism alone didn’t win market share; innovation did. By the turn of the century, the chocolate business was booming, and competitors sprang up beyond the Quaker circle. Cadbury’s commitment to quality was tested in the late 1800s by a scandal over adulterated cocoa beans sourced from Portuguese West Africa, which turned out to be harvested by enslaved workers. Horrified, the Cadburys and Rowntrees joined forces to reform the supply chain, even sending investigators abroad and ultimately boycotting slave-grown cocoa. This episode demonstrated that even amid rivalry, shared values could triumph – a stark contrast to the more ruthless corporate battles to come.

Having navigated that moral crisis, Cadbury scored a commercial triumph in 1905 with the debut of Dairy Milk chocolate. By using a higher proportion of milk than any rival had dared, Cadbury produced a rich, creamy bar that was an instant sensation. Dairy Milk was marketed with the slogan “a glass and a half of milk in every bar,” reinforcing an image of wholesome indulgence. The new recipe gave Cadbury a decisive lead in the British chocolate wars: by the outbreak of World War I, Dairy Milk was outselling all competitors and defined the taste of British milk chocolate. Rowntree’s, which lacked a milk chocolate blockbuster, saw its fortunes wane in comparison. For a time, it seemed Cadbury had vanquished its local foes by sheer force of flavor.

But the war and its aftermath leveled the playing field. Cocoa and sugar were rationed; consumers had limited options, and companies struggled to survive. In the 1920s, Rowntree’s was teetering – a distant second to Cadbury in chocolates, with an ageing product line. Enter a visionary named George Harris, a dynamic marketing director at Rowntree’s. Harris recognized that directly imitating Cadbury’s Dairy Milk was a losing battle. Instead, he pushed Rowntree’s to invent entirely new types of chocolate treats. His first masterstroke was Black Magic in 1933 – a stylish box of assorted chocolates for gifting, designed through extensive consumer research. It was a hit. Harris then green-lit two bold new products in 1935: the KitKat (a light wafer biscuit covered in chocolate, sold as a convenient “snack” bar) and the Aero (an aerated chocolate bar filled with tiny bubbles). These novel creations, backed by clever advertising, tapped into consumers’ desire for variety and fun. By 1936, for the first time in decades, Rowntree’s sales began to seriously threaten Cadbury’s dominance. The lesson was clear: you could not topple a giant like Dairy Milk with a copycat – you needed to change the game.

The Race for Flavor and Innovation

Meanwhile, a parallel chocolate revolution had been unfolding on the European continent, spurring another kind of rivalry – an arms race in technical innovation and flavor finesse. Throughout the 19th century, the Swiss, French, and Dutch chocolatiers vied to create ever smoother, tastier chocolate. In Switzerland, Daniel Peter, working with Henri Nestlé (inventor of condensed milk), finally perfected the recipe for milk chocolate in 1875. By drying and mixing milk with cocoa liquor and sugar, Peter produced a solid milk chocolate that was much smoother and milkier than any British “chocolate with milk” that had come before. The Swiss had effectively thrown down the gauntlet to the world: this was how chocolate should taste – rich, creamy, and sweet.

Not to be outdone, a Swiss confectioner named Rodolphe Lindt took flavor to new heights in 1879 by inventing the conching process. Legend has it Lindt accidentally left a mixer running overnight, and by morning the gritty cocoa paste had turned silky and mellow. Conching – prolonged churning of heated chocolate – transforms its texture and releases complex aromas. Lindt’s conched chocolate was so superior in mouthfeel that other manufacturers scrambled to adopt or imitate the method. Suddenly, any chocolatier still producing coarse, rough chocolate was behind the times. The rivalry now was not only between companies, but between methods. Those who innovated (or quickly copied innovations) leaped ahead, while others fell by the wayside. In France, the Menier family had pioneered large-scale mechanized chocolate production and were wrapping chocolate bars in eye-catching labels by mid-century, setting marketing trends that British and American firms would later follow. Across the chocolate-making world, ideas were cross-pollinating: one breakthrough in Holland or Switzerland would spur a response in England or America. Everyone, it seemed, was chasing the ultimate goal – the smoothest, most delicious chocolate imaginable.

By the early 20th century, as knowledge spread, the playing field in terms of technique was leveling out. Conching, milk formulas, better presses – these became standard tools of the trade. So chocolatiers turned to other means to gain an edge: branding and new flavors. Here again, rivalry pushed creativity. If one company introduced a chocolate studded with hazelnuts, a rival would debut one with almonds. If a French chocolatier created delicate praline-filled bonbons (as Jean Neuhaus did in Belgium in 1912, inventing the first hard chocolate shell pralines), competitors from London to New York raced to offer their own assorted chocolate boxes. With each new confection – caramel-filled bars, fruit crèmes, crispy rice chocolate (such as Nestlé’s Crunch bar of 1938, swiftly answered by Hershey’s Krackel) – the competition intensified. Consumers reaped the rewards of this delicious one-upmanship: more variety and better taste than ever before.

Candy Spies and the Battle for Britain

As the 20th century progressed, the stakes grew higher. The chocolate market was a substantial industry, and the genteel cooperation of the Quaker founding fathers gave way to something more aggressive. Nowhere was this more evident than in Britain during the interwar period, where the Chocolate Wars between Cadbury and Rowntree escalated into a full-on rivalry – complete with espionage. Both companies had become household names, employing thousands and spreading their reach across the British Empire. With so much to lose or gain, each was obsessed with the other’s moves. Rumors swirled of secret informants and stolen recipes. In fact, it became something of an industrial legend that Cadbury and Rowntree routinely planted spies in each other’s factories. Dahl’s fantastical vision of rival candy men sabotaging one another was rooted in this very reality. To protect their trade secrets, chocolate companies hired private detectives and kept new product development under veil of darkness. In the 1920s and 30s, you’d sooner get into Fort Knox than pry into the goings-on in a confectionery R&D lab.

This climate of paranoia bore fruit in rapid innovation. After the success of KitKat and Aero, Rowntree’s continued to gamble on new ideas, launching Smarties (sugar-coated chocolate buttons) in 1937 and polishing off a minty chocolate marvel called After Eight in 1962. Cadbury answered in kind, introducing the Flake bar (1920), the Crunchie honeycomb bar (with a partner company in 1929), and throughout the 20th century expanding its line of fruit-and-nut chocolates and assorted Milk Tray confections. Each tried to outmaneuver the other with advertising too. Rowntree’s famously coined the slogan “Have a Break, Have a KitKat,” embedding their product into British culture as the go-to snack with your tea break. Cadbury countered by marketing chocolate not just as candy but as an experience of comfort and joy – who can forget the cheeky “Everyone’s a Fruit and Nutcase” jingle or the mysterious Milk Tray Man delivering chocolates by stealth? The rivalry was heated, but it spurred both companies to refine not only their flavors but their image. By mid-century, Cadbury was synonymous with creamy, family-friendly indulgence, while Rowntree’s products stood for playful fun and youthful energy.

Yet an unexpected challenger was about to crash this British party – an American upstart with a very different philosophy. In 1932, an ambitious young man named Forrest Mars Sr. arrived in London with a chip on his shoulder and a head full of ideas. Forrest was the estranged son of Frank Mars, a self-made candy king from Minnesota who had found success in the U.S. with the Milky Way bar. After a bitter falling-out with his father, Forrest left the comfort of the family firm and set up his own operation in England to prove his mettle. In the London suburb of Slough, he founded Mars Limited and launched a new bar tailored to British tastes – the Mars Bar (a caramel-and-nougat bar similar to the American Milky Way, but marketed as a substantial snack “to help you work, rest, and play”). With this one product, Forrest Mars planted a flag on Cadbury’s turf, and he had no intention of stopping there. Ruthlessly efficient and relentlessly focused, Mars ran his factory with military precision. He studied production lines, eliminated waste, and kept formulas secret. Unlike the Quaker firms, Mars had no qualms about profit-driven pragmatism. Price competition, hard bargaining with suppliers, aggressive advertising – these were his tools. British competitors were quickly unnerved by Mars’s unflinching approach. The chocolate cold war had begun in earnest: Cadbury vs. Rowntree vs. Mars – three giants with three very different philosophies colliding in postwar Britain.

Mars’s arrival brought new dimensions to the rivalry. Cadbury and Rowntree, for all their competition, had been bound by a certain gentlemanly decorum and shared values. Forrest Mars cared for neither. He believed in winning, full stop. If his rivals built model villages, Mars built an empire of secrecy. His company famously refused any publicity or interviews, and even decades later, the Mars family kept details of their operations under wraps. But the products spoke loudly. Mars introduced Britons to Maltesers (chocolate malted-milk balls) and a smooth Galaxy milk chocolate bar (known elsewhere as Dove), directly challenging Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with a silkier texture. With substantial funds behind it, Mars blitzed the airwaves and billboards with catchy slogans like the enduring “A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.” Suddenly, Cadbury’s advertising, which leaned on nostalgia and whimsy, looked old-fashioned next to Mars’s punchy, promise-driven campaigns.

The British chocolate market in the 1970s and 80s became a fierce battleground. Each holiday was an opportunity to one-up the other – Cadbury cultivated the Easter egg tradition and later the gooey Creme Egg, Mars pushed into Christmas selection boxes and anytime treats. Supermarkets stocked rival armies of candy bars: Crunchie vs. Mars Bar, KitKat vs. Twix (Mars’s chocolate-coated biscuit bar), Smarties vs. M&M’s (which Mars introduced to the UK). It was a fight for shelf space and hearts. Through it all, Cadbury and Rowntree never forgot their philanthropic roots – they still prided themselves on charitable works and fair dealing – but they had to adopt some of Mars’s hard-nosed tactics or risk defeat. By the late 1980s, this three-way rivalry reached a dramatic turning point through corporate twists of fate that few had foreseen.

Hershey vs. Mars: A Duel in the New World

Even as the battles raged in Europe, across the ocean another epic rivalry was taking shape – one that would pit two very different American titans head-to-head and ultimately reshape the global industry. The protagonists could not have been more different: Milton Hershey, the kindly, idealistic founder of The Hershey Chocolate Company, and Forrest Mars Sr., the driven, often ruthless architect of Mars, Incorporated. Their clash would become the stuff of business legend, casting them in many observers’ eyes as chocolate’s very own embodiment of good vs. evil.

Milton Hershey’s journey into chocolate began with a stroke of inspiration at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where he marveled at a European exhibitor’s chocolate-making machinery. At the time, Hershey was a successful caramel producer, but he foresaw that chocolate was the future. He bought the necessary equipment on the spot and shipped it home to Pennsylvania. By 1900, he had sold his caramel business and was churning out the first Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bars, determined to make this once-luxurious Swiss treat affordable to the common man. In 1903, Hershey broke ground on a new factory in rural Derry Township and went on to build a whole town around it – Hershey, Pennsylvania, a direct homage to Cadbury’s Bournville. Hershey’s model town featured comfortable homes for workers, trolley cars, a public school, a library, and eventually even an amusement park. Workers earned decent wages and enjoyed unheard-of benefits, all under the benevolent gaze of “Mr. Hershey,” who wandered the factory floor in his white suit, knowing many employees by name. Childless, Milton and his wife founded a residential school for orphaned boys in 1909, endowing it with most of their wealth. The Hershey Industrial School (today the Milton Hershey School) still exists, funded by the trust that owns a controlling stake in the company. In short, Milton Hershey was more than a businessman – he was a philanthropist who used chocolate to attempt a miniature utopia in the Pennsylvania countryside. His company’s motto might as well have been doing well by doing good.

For decades, Hershey enjoyed uncontested dominance in the American chocolate scene. Its flagship chocolate bar – often simply called “The Great American Chocolate Bar” – became an icon. Hershey’s Kisses (introduced in 1907) were a delight, and the company even supplied chocolate rations to U.S. troops in both World Wars. Hershey’s approach to business was old-fashioned: focus on a few core products, maintain quality, don’t take on debt, and avoid dirty competition. In fact, under Milton Hershey, the company refused to spend a penny on advertising, feeling the product should speak for itself. It was a tranquil chocolate kingdom – but one that was about to be disrupted by the very same Forrest Mars who had shaken up Britain.

Forrest Mars’s return to the United States in the late 1930s set the stage for a showdown. After his father Frank’s death, Forrest took control of Mars, Inc. and immediately began applying the rigorous methods that had fueled his UK venture. One of his first challenges was this: Mars’s American business still bought its chocolate coating from none other than Hershey. (In a remarkable arrangement, the Mars company’s early hits – the Milky Way and Snickers bars – were essentially collaborations, with Hershey supplying the chocolate that enrobed Mars’s nougat and caramel). Forrest Mars had no intention of remaining dependent on a rival, however amicable that long-standing relationship had been. He stunned Hershey’s executives by cutting off all purchases and investing heavily to produce Mars’s own chocolate from scratch. At the same time, he identified an ingenious way to leverage Hershey’s strength for his own gain: in 1941, anticipating wartime rationing, Forrest approached Bruce Murrie – son of Hershey’s president – to propose a new candy venture. Forrest had learned of a British concept (originally from soldiers in the Spanish Civil War) of small chocolate pellets encased in sugar shells that wouldn’t melt easily. He wanted to produce these “chocolate Midgets,” but he needed steady supplies of chocolate and sugar, which were about to be tightly controlled by the government in World War II.

The solution was as bold as it was shrewd: Forrest Mars offered Bruce Murrie a 20% stake in the new candy, to be called M&M’s (for Mars & Murrie), in exchange for Hershey’s support. The Hershey company, effectively, would ensure M&M’s had all the raw materials it needed – a guarantee no other competitor could get during rationing. The deal was struck, and soon M&M’s (packaged in convenient cardboard tubes) were being shipped exclusively to American G.I.s overseas as part of their rations. “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” the advertising would later boast – a slogan that became legend. As for Milton Hershey’s company, it found itself in the awkward position of enabling what would become its fiercest rival. By war’s end, American soldiers were coming home hooked on M&M’s, and Mars was primed to launch them to the public. In 1948, with sugar rationing over, Forrest wasted no time in buying out Bruce Murrie’s share and kicking the Hershey partner to the curb. M&M’s was now 100% Mars’s property – and Hershey had inadvertently nurtured the seed of its own looming downfall.

What followed in the post-war decades was a titanic duel for America’s sweet tooth. Mars rolled out a procession of hit products: the M&M’s line expanded with peanuts, then other colors and flavors; the Three Musketeers bar, Skittles candies, and more. Hershey, initially slow to react, stayed with its knitting: Hershey bars, Kisses, and a few new tries like the Hershey’s Special Dark bar. Hershey did make one brilliant move in 1963 by acquiring the H.B. Reese Candy Company, makers of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups – a beloved candy that combined peanut butter and chocolate. The Reese’s cup, created by a former Hershey employee turned rival, would become Hershey’s best weapon against Mars’s confections (and in fact, Mars notably never managed to create an equivalent peanut butter chocolate success to rival Reese’s). Still, by the early 1960s, Hershey’s complacency was apparent. The company was still run in the spirit of Milton Hershey – cautious, community-minded, content with its dominant market share and high quality. Advertising was minimal; marketing strategy was stuck in a bygone era. Mars, by contrast, was hungry and unsentimental. Forrest Mars referred to Hershey as “the sleeping giant.” He was determined to shake it awake – or shove it aside.

The 1960s became Hershey’s trial by fire. Forrest Mars unleashed a full frontal assault: investing in state-of-the-art factories, flooding TV and print with advertisements, and introducing new candies to exploit any gap in Hershey’s lineup. Mars’s corporate culture, intense and top-secret, contrasted sharply with Hershey’s paternalistic town-hall vibe. Employees at Hershey still felt they were part of a family; employees at Mars felt they were part of a war. Under the pressure of Mars’s onslaught, Hershey began to lose ground. By decade’s end, Mars had nearly pulled even in U.S. chocolate sales. The once-unassailable Hershey empire was wobbling, its share of the market shrinking year by year. There was even talk in the Hershey boardroom that the company’s survival was at stake if they didn’t modernize. Thus, the great Hershey vs. Mars rivalry forced a reckoning. In the 1970s, Hershey’s management brought in outside talent and adopted many of Mars’s tactics. They began regular advertising for the first time, launched new products (like the KitKat bar in the U.S. under license, and later the Take5 and Whatchamacallit bars), and diversified into things like cookies and crackers. The company also gradually shifted away from the all-encompassing social benefits Milton Hershey had provided. The free housing, schools, and other perks in the town of Hershey were reduced or ended as the company focused more on efficiency and profit – much to the dismay of locals, but signaling that Hershey was entering the late-20th-century corporate reality at last.

Forrest Mars, having disrupted the industry and reached the top ranks of global wealth, stepped back from day-to-day operations in the late 1970s (passing leadership to his children). Milton Hershey had long since passed away in 1945, his name and legacy now an indelible part of American folklore. The rivalry their companies began would continue into the new millennium, but by the 1990s Hershey and Mars had settled into an uneasy duopoly in the U.S. market – together controlling the lion’s share of candy sales, but each remaining fiercely competitive. Their styles were still night and day: Hershey, a publicly traded company controlled by a charitable trust, still emphasized community and tradition in its branding (think of the nostalgic Christmas ads of Hershey’s Kisses ringing like bells). Mars, entirely private and family-owned, maintained its aura of mystery while pushing a global expansion and snapping up other brands (including Wrigley’s gum in 2008) to become the world’s largest confectioner. If Hershey was the heart of chocolate in America, Mars had become the muscle.

Global Conquests and Modern Showdowns

As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the chocolate world saw its once-distinct fiefdoms merge into a truly global market – and with globalization came a new wave of rivalries, takeovers, and shifting alliances. The old Quaker companies of Britain would face their destinies in this new era, and new players from Europe would rise to stand alongside the American giants.

One of the most significant developments was the dramatic end of the independent British chocolate makers. In 1988, Rowntree – the company that had so ingeniously fought back against Cadbury with KitKats and Aeros – fell prey to a takeover. It wasn’t Cadbury who conquered them, but Swiss food behemoth Nestlé. The acquisition was like a changing of the guard: the venerable Rowntree name (and with it, beloved brands like KitKat, Smarties, and After Eight) passed into foreign hands, ending over a century of family ownership. Nestlé’s victory in that bidding war highlighted how international the chocolate business had become – even a company from a small town in York was now part of a multinational portfolio. For a time, Nestlé seemed poised to challenge Mars for global preeminence, assembling a stable of brands across continents.

Cadbury, on the other hand, survived the 20th century still under British control and even prospered, expanding its reach into Asia, Africa, and the Americas (often becoming the leading brand in former British colonies where the Cadbury name had long been established). Cadbury had merged with the drinks company Schweppes in the 1960s, but chocolate remained its soul. The company continued to innovate gently – introducing the world’s first chocolate bar with a filled center (Cadbury Crème Eggs became a phenomenon), playing with new flavors of Dairy Milk, and acquiring smaller firms to boost its candy range (like Fry’s, which Cadbury had actually merged with as far back as 1919, and later the U.S. candy brand Adams in the 2000s). Through it all, Cadbury projected an image of quintessential British sweetness and benevolence – its founding principles kept alive in philanthropic projects and a generally warm, family-friendly brand aura.

Perhaps that’s why it came as such a shock to Britain when, in 2009, Cadbury found itself the target of a hostile takeover by the American food conglomerate Kraft Foods. The battle was intense and emotional. Cadbury’s management initially resisted fiercely – supported by British public opinion, which was largely aghast that a treasured national company might be swallowed by a foreign corporation known mostly for processed cheese and Oreos. Kraft’s CEO argued that the combined company would create synergies and global growth, but critics saw it as an old story of financial muscle overpowering heritage and values. Despite public protests and even debates in Parliament, Cadbury’s defenses fell. In early 2010, Kraft succeeded in purchasing Cadbury for around £11.5 billion. The purple-wrapped Dairy Milk bars that had once been the pride of a Quaker family business now became assets in a vast, impersonal multinational. It was a bittersweet end to an era – a “bitter feud” in its own right, pitting Cadbury’s independent legacy against Kraft’s corporate might.

The aftermath of that deal saw Kraft split off its global snack and candy business into a new company, Mondelez International, which today houses Cadbury as one of its premier brands. And interestingly, Mondelez soon found itself facing off with Hershey in a peculiar transatlantic rivalry: because Hershey holds the license to produce Cadbury products in the United States (a relationship dating back to a partnership with Cadbury long ago), disputes have arisen over whose Cadbury chocolate is “real” and whether Brits can import their beloved UK-made Cadbury bars into America. In 2015, Hershey famously sued to stop imports of British Cadbury chocolate, citing trademark infringement, much to the outrage of British expats and chocolate connoisseurs in the States. The feud highlighted a fundamental difference in philosophy: British Cadbury’s recipe is creamier and uses different milk, whereas the Hershey-made version has that characteristic tang that American consumers expect. The question of which tastes better is a matter of national loyalty – and it proves that even after acquisitions and globalization, rivalries over taste and tradition remain potent.

Amid all these changes, new champions have risen in Europe as well. The Ferrero family of Italy, makers of Nutella and Ferrero Rocher, built a confectionery empire in the late 20th century by going against the conventional wisdom. Michele Ferrero, son of the company’s founder, kept the business fiercely private (much like Mars) and emphasized a very narrow range of unique products. His company focused on quality, a bit of mystery, and creating its own niches – chocolate-hazelnut spread (Nutella) or kinder chocolates for children – rather than trying to copy others. For decades, Ferrero avoided the high-profile rivalries, preferring to fly under the radar. But by the 2010s, Ferrero had grown into a global powerhouse second only to Mars in candy revenue, even quietly acquiring former Nestlé brands like Butterfinger and BabyRuth in the U.S. Ferrero’s rise is another testament to how a singular vision – in this case, the pursuit of a particular flavor profile (the combination of rich cocoa and roasted hazelnut which Italians adore) – can challenge established giants. It’s quite poetic that while everyone else was fighting over chocolate bars and market share, Ferrero conquered by creating an addiction to a chocolate spread that people would slather on their breakfast toast.

We also see the Swiss firm Lindt & Sprüngli, inheritor of Rodolphe Lindt’s conching legacy, staking a claim in the modern premium chocolate market. Through the late 20th century, Lindt transformed from a continental luxury brand into a worldwide ambassador of Swiss chocolate excellence. They opened boutiques, pushed their Lindor truffles as affordable luxuries, and acquired other brands like California’s Ghirardelli. Lindt’s rivalry has been less with any single company and more with the notion of mediocrity – they have long sought to convert milk chocolate lovers to a smoother, higher-cacao experience, competing on quality in a market flooded with cheaper candy. In that sense, Lindt (and other gourmet chocolatiers from Belgium, France, and beyond) form another front in the chocolate wars: mass vs. class. By the 21st century, a discerning segment of consumers began gravitating toward small-batch, single-origin dark chocolates made by artisan makers. These craft chocolate makers – the modern “master chocolatiers” working on a smaller scale – inherently set themselves up in rivalry against the “Big Chocolate” of Mars, Mondelez, Hershey, Nestlé, and Ferrero. The feud here is philosophical: bean-to-bar purity and ethical sourcing versus massive volume and cost efficiency. While this battle is still playing out, it echoes the very earliest chocolate rivalries when purity and ethics were on the line. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

A Legacy Etched in Chocolate

After centuries of conquest and competition, what has emerged is a chocolate landscape rich and diverse – a direct result of those bitter feuds and clashing philosophies. The winners and losers of individual battles have mattered less, in the long run, than the innovations they spawned. Thanks to rivalries, we have milk chocolate and dark, bars filled with caramel or cookie pieces, truffles that melt in your mouth, and candies that can travel to war or space without melting at all. Each leap forward in flavor or texture was driven by someone striving to outdo someone else: a smoother process, a richer recipe, a smarter marketing hook.

The personalities behind these struggles have become legends in their own right. Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars – one remembered as a benevolent dreamer, the other as an exacting empire-builder – both irrevocably shaped how the world enjoys candy. The Cadbury brothers and the Rowntrees proved that business can have a conscience, even as they fought for market primacy. Their legacy lives on every time a Dairy Milk or KitKat is unwrapped during a work break or a holiday gathering. And those Quaker pioneers might find some satisfaction in the fact that, even as their companies were absorbed by bigger fish, the debate they started about the soul of business carries on. Are companies beholden only to profit, or also to people? In the chocolate world, we’ve seen models for both, each successful on its own terms.

In the end, chocolate’s great rivalries have done more than create corporate winners and losers – they’ve given us an endless assortment of treats and stories to savor. Whether you prefer the simple nostalgia of a Hershey bar, the creamy comfort of Cadbury, the playful crunch of an M&M or KitKat, or an elegant Lindt truffle, you are enjoying the spoils of wars fought long ago (and some still being fought). The feuds were often bitter, but they pushed chocolatiers to be better – to dream up wilder flavors, craft smoother confections, and package joy in ever more delectable ways. The next time you indulge in a piece of chocolate, you might taste a hint of that history: the inventiveness, the passion, and yes, the competitive fire that have fueled chocolate’s rise from a humble drink to a global obsession. In a world of constant change, one thing remains sweetly consistent: whenever chocolate lovers benefit, chances are a rivalry was the secret ingredient.