With a Glass and a Half of Milk...

While I've always had a sweet tooth for chocolate, I've never been much of a fan of milk chocolate.

I have to admit now, that I have been missing out, well at least on one milk chocolate product, Cadbury Dairy Milk.

Cadbury was founded in 1824 by John Cadbury in Bull Street, Birmingham, England. By 1842, they were offering 11 types of cocoa and 16 distinct types of drinking chocolate.

In June 1904, Cadbury created a chocolate containing a "far higher milk content than previously known" as a challenge to the Swiss domination of the chocolate market. It  was launched as Cadbury Dairy milk in 1905 and was an instant success. By the mid 1920s, Cadbury Dairy Milk was the best selling chocolate brand in the United Kingdom and it remains so even today.

 1920 Cadbury Dairy Milk advertisement from Cadbury Archives

Cadbury introduced the advertising slogan "Glass and a half of full cream milk in every half pound," in 1928. Fifty years later, the "glass and a half" design was added to the packaging, where it still appears.

In March 2009, Cadbury announced that it would use 100% Fairtrade cocoa in Cadbury Dairy Milk, re-energizing the cocoa farms in Ghana that supply Cadbury with cocoa beans.

Cadbury is also made in the United States, under agreement with Hershey.

Do the British and the American Dairy Milk bars taste the same? Do they use the same ingredients? Which one is better?

The only way I felt fair to do this was to contact Hershey's, which makes Dairy Milk in the US for Cadbury. Unfortunately they never did respond to my e-mail. So, instead I went to Hershey and bought a bar of the Hershey made Dairy milk at Chocolate World to use in a completely unscientific blind taste test at home. The British Dairy Milk was purchased online thought a British Food company.

My wife, who studied for a year at St. Andrew's and had some previous experience with British Cadbury, agreed to be the blind panel.

She immediately identified the Hershey's made Dairy Milk from the British made version. What she found, was the American version had a very distinctive Hershey taste. While not unpleasant, it was not the same as the British made version, but far superior to Hershey Milk Chocolate. If you have never had British Dairy Milk, it is a very good milk chocolate, with a creaminess most American chocolates lack.

The British Dairy Milk was much more along the lines of the Swiss chocolate against which it was originally designed to compete. And it lacked a distinctive sour finish which we both find in all Hershey Milk Chocolate. It is truly milk chocolate heaven. And that is no small praise coming from someone who really has never enjoyed milk chocolate.

So why the difference in the American made and the UK made Cadbury chocolate? Well, I got a nice reply from Cadbury and what they had to say made complete sense. “While the recipe is a closely guarded secret, one of the main reasons for the different taste, not just between US and UK, but with Cadbury Dairy Milk across the globe (Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand), is they are all made with local milk. So each country has its very unique taste. There are also other factors that can affect the taste of the chocolate, even with the recipe being the same, for example if we used the same way of producing Cadbury Dairy Milk in the UK, but in a hot Australian summer the chocolate would melt before it reached the stores shelf. So in Australia and other warmer climate areas, we produce the chocolate to be able to hold its shape at those temperatures, so that it only melts once it’s in your mouth.”

So if you have a Cadbury Dairy Milk from the UK and one from Hershey, you now know that the difference is not in your head or some bias you might have for or against one country of origin, but a real difference in the ingredients.

So when it comes to milk chocolate, I'm going to look far and wide to find the British version of Cadbury Dairy Milk when I have the urge for some extraordinary milk chocolate. Thankfully, I still have some more of the British Dairy Milk remaining from my taste challenge to enjoy now that I've done sharing my results with you...

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