Cadbury Chocolate Case Study

It is little known what kind of rivals there are in the chocolate industry. Is it a rivalry similar to what is present with siblings that is continuous with no clear winner or loser, or one like sports team rivalry’s where there is a winner and a loser? It is safe to say that it is a conjunction of the two, where it is a continuous cycle of winners and losers. With these rivals comes a story of hardships in bringing a start of a business, with breakthroughs soon after, and lastly the rivals accumulated over time. A wonderful example of a now successful industry that had a rocky start is Cadbury. The beginnings of Cadbury chocolate were not an immediate hit, nor was it successful until a rival moved into Cadbury territory. This rivalry gave

Cadbury had one of the harder times starting up a business. John Cadbury, started up a chocolate factory (which, at first, primarily sold tea and coffee) in Birmingham, England. At the time of the opening, cocoa beans were used for chocolate drinks, and no particular solid forms were used for eating. In other words, chocolate was not what we think of chocolate today, it was chocolate milk that was on the markets. However, as tempting as any chocolate product sounds, this was not as successful as he originally thought it would be. John decided that his sons George and Richard could aid in the factory, and is inevitably taken over by the two. With a chocolate factory having a bad reputation, and slowly going into horrible debt, the brothers had a mess they needed to recoil into a more sustainable business. In a need of change in quality and quantity of the chocolate, the brothers were able to create three new lines of high quality cocoa. Each giving a slight boost in popularity and business, but not enough to significantly change their life styles or situation the business was in. The big boost the business needed was a motivation, or a

In fact, they need a push, a rival. This brings up the rival, the Fry brothers, that particularly challenged the Cadbury company to be better. In other words, it gave them some more motivation to continue their work. A fairly well established business, with fourth generation owners gave room for the Fry’s to take over the chocolate business in Britain. They not only were fairly established in their line of business, they had a revolutionary product. This product was the first chocolate bar, created from a paste, mashed into a solid. The biggest thing that set the Fry brothers way above the Cadbury brothers, besides the previous success, was the monstrous amount of manufacturing facilities that they owned. The Cadburys really had one main facility for the manufacturing of their chocolate while the Fry’s had four main facilities. This made Fry’s chocolate more accessible, and prevalent around Britain. This kind of leader in the chocolate business did not halt Cadburys, but rather gave them the opportunity to surprise them. From cleaver marketing slogans, to breakthroughs, to calculated investment risks, the Cadburys found themselves leveling the playing