Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry

London: Harper Collins, 2010 9780007374854. 1st edition. First printing. Number 1. Hardback with dust jacket which is NOT price-clipped. Like New. Octavo xi + 340pp., profusely illustrated throughout with colour & b/w plates, very detailed bibliography and index, No inscriptions or annotations. The true story of the world’s most famous chocolate firms by the award-winning writer and descendant of the Cadbury chocolate dynasty. In 'Chocolate Wars' the bestselling historian Deborah Cadbury takes a journey into her own family history to uncover the rivalries that have driven 250 years of chocolate empire-building. In the early nineteenth century Richard Tapper Cadbury sent his son, John, to London to study a new and exotic commodity: cocoa. Within a generation, John's sons, Richard and George, had created a chocolate company to rival the great English firms of Fry and Rowntree, and their European competitors Lindt and Nestlé. The major English firms were all Quaker family enterprises, and their business aims were infused with religious idealism. In America, Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars proved that they had the appetite for business on a huge scale, and successfully resisted the English companies' attempts to master the American market. As chocolate companies raced to compete around the globe, Quaker capitalism met a challenge that would eventually defeat it. At the turn of the millennium Cadbury, the sole independent survivor of England's chocolate dynasties, became the world's largest confectionary company. But before long it too faced a threat to its very survival, and the chocolate wars culminated in a multi-billion pound showdown pitting independence and Quaker tradition against the cut-throat tactics of a corporate leviathan. Featuring a colourful cast of savvy entrepreneurs, brilliant eccentrics and resourceful visionaries, ‘Chocolate Wars’ is the story of a uniquely alluring product and of the evolution, for better and worse, of modern business. As a case study of a benevolent industrial UK development owned and run by a Quaker dynasty which was taken over in the 21st century by a USA global concern this is possibly unequaled in its historical and managerial analysis. .