Will Kraft’s plastic cheese smother Cadbury’s heritage?

Elliot Wilson says there are synergies between the takeover protagonists — but it will be sad to see the British chocolate maker swallowed by a bloated US conglomerate

When consumer goods giant Kraft tabled a £10.2 billion bid for Cadbury two weeks ago, the outcry was immediate and heartfelt. Here was an American monster buying an iconic British household name, one of our very last independent, home-grown, corporate crown jewels.

Some of the resentment was understandable. Cadbury’s heritage is part of our national psyche. Founded 185 years ago by John Cadbury, a Quaker tea-and-coffee trader, the firm’s aims were as much to do with social improvement as with profit. Moreover, Cadbury seemed to be a great survivor. Britain has long shed the last of its major indigenous carmakers and seen other business titans such as BT reduced to a shadow of their former selves. Cadbury rose above the industrial turmoil of the 1970s, and rode out the mergers-and-acquisitions boom of the past two decades. Unflappable, apparently untouchable, it just carried on making everything from Dairy Milk chocolate bars to Bassett’s Jelly Babies.

Then came Kraft, America’s largest food-and-drinks firm with $42 billion in annual sales and the financial backing of Citigroup and Deutsche Bank. The hostile nature of the bid took the British public by surprise, but raised few eyebrows in the City. Most bankers in London had been expecting something like this either from Kraft or from Hershey, America’s largest confectioner, ever since what was then Cadbury Schweppes spun off its soft drinks division in 2008. That process made a renamed Cadbury plc more streamlined — and more attractive as a bid target for anyone with enough finance in hand.