Milk had been combined with cocoa since Hans Sloane had developed a recipe for it in 1727. Cadbury used the recipe for their own product, which lasted from 1849-1885. But what about chocolate you could eat?
If you could eat chocolate, it wouldn’t need preparing and you could carry it around – the possibilities were huge. But early chocolate was dry and crumbly. In 1879 Cadbury began making bars of dark chocolate but it wasn’t hugely successful.
But developments came thick and fast. A Swiss manufacturer, Rudolphe Lindt, invented ‘conching’, a way to make chocolate smoother and much more like we know it today –in the same year. Around the same time another Swiss chocolate maker produced milk chocolate. Cadbury’s own milk chocolate bar, made by adding milk powder paste to the dark chocolate recipe of cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar, was launched in 1897, but it didn’t attract a lot of interest.
Swiss manufacturers were leading the field in milk chocolate, with much better products than their rivals. So in 1904 George Cadbury Jnr was tasked with developing a milk chocolate bar which was to have more milk than anything else on the market.
All sorts of names were suggested: Highland Milk, Jersey and Dairy Maid. But when a customer’s daughter suggested Dairy Milk, the name stuck.
Dairy Milk was launched in June 1905. It was sold in unwrapped blocks that could be broken down into penny bars. Gradually it became more and more successful – Cadbury’s biggest seller by the beginning of the First World War, and by the early 1920s it had taken over the UK market.
And of course, it’s still with us today. Cadbury Dairy Milk has become a megabrand. Available in many different varieties, it’s a firm favourite all over the world.