United Kingdom: Losing Cadbury to the Americans

Say goodbye to the delectable Creme Egg, said George Tyndale in the Birmingham Sunday Mercury. Cadbury, one of the truly great British brands, has just been “packaged up and sold to a tacky Yankee cheesemaker.” That’s right, Kraft, a firm “famous for its plastic cheese squares,” has bought up Cadbury, and our government couldn’t do a thing to prevent it. Years ago, the Labor government “waived its rights to stand up for Britain” and prevent takeovers on grounds of national interest. So now we all have to sit by and watch as British jobs go overseas. The Birmingham plant where Cadbury chocolates have been made for more than 100 years will surely “be hacked, hacked, and hacked again by its new owners in the reckless pursuit of profit.” And it’s not just the job losses that hurt: Kraft could easily ax any product in the Cadbury line, like Creme Eggs or Flakes.

It’s not as if Cadbury was in some sort of financial trouble, said Joan Burnie in the Glasgow Daily Record. In fact, it was doing better than Kraft, which had to take out a huge loan to buy it. And here’s the really painful kicker: Kraft borrowed the money from us, from the Royal Bank of Scotland. I suppose we’ll have to accept the fact that “our politicians won’t do anything to stop this once-proud nation becoming little more than an industrial corpse out of which the business vultures pick the choicest bits.” But at least they could “tell those Yankees to bug off and look elsewhere for their filthy lucre.”

This entire business could not be more distasteful—literally, said Charlie Brooker in the London Guardian. What if Kraft now tries to Americanize Cadbury? American chocolate is nothing short of revolting. When I first bit into a Hershey bar, I was “plunged mouthwards into an entire universe of yuck.” It tasted like cardboard, but with a nastier, chalkier texture, “as though this was a chocolate bar that had been found in the pocket of a Civil War soldier and preserved specifically for my disenchantment.” Americans just can’t do sweets, said Anita Robinson in the Dublin Irish News. Their most famous cookie, the Oreo, is “two tooth-breaking mahogany discs glued together with sweetened candle wax.” Chocolate lovers everywhere can only hope that Kraft’s corporate bigwigs know how to appreciate Cadbury’s “uniquely creamy mouth feel” and don’t try to change the recipe.

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Let’s just “take a deep breath,” said Andrew Clark in the London Observer. Remember how we all mocked France, when Pepsi tried to buy Danone four years ago and France declared the yogurt company “strategically important”? The Americans are laughing at us in the same way. Kraft is not going to stop making our beloved Dairy Milks or Curly Wurlys, nor will British workers be laid off en masse. In fact, the company has assured us it will keep production in Britain and even try to save a factory that Cadbury was planning to shutter. Takeovers happen. It’s time to “stop tragically waving our union flags and calm down.”