Chocolate Philanthropists

Many of the first chocolate manufacturers all over the world are renowned because of their philanthropy and care towards their workers. In England this was due in most part to that the three most prominent chocolate manufacturers – Joseph Fry, John Cadbury and Henry Rowntree – were all Quakers. Since they were all teetotalers, these Quakers had reason enough to recommend against drinking alcoholic drinks and suggested non-alcoholic drinks such as tea, coffee, and chocolate.

Around the change of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, when doctors were extremely expensive, the workers of Cadbury had regular doctors, and the uniforms they wore were given to them completely free. The company was big enough to appreciate the value of physical exercise, and the workers were given a lady that was a “Swedish gym specialist” who not only taught gymnastics but swimming and “a numerous amount of other sports” as well.

In 1879, when a new factory on the outsides of Birmingham was being built, George and Richard Cadbury followed along with the idea of the French chocolate maker Jean Menier and not only built a factory but an entire town – with a cricket pitch – for all of their workers. This is how Bournville was created, and where the actual Cadbury factory is still located today. Milton Hershey in Pennsylvania U.S.A. also adapted this idea and when he built his chocolate factory, he created the model city of Hersheyville.

The Swiss chocolate producer Philippe Suchard (1797 – 1884) also had a spirit of improving things. He was one of the first owners that insured his workers against accidents, something that is now required by law.

Thanks to this campaign carried about by the English manufacturers, along with their Swiss and German fellowmen, that slavery was abolished in the cacao plantations of the Portuguese occidental Africa, where the mortality rate was nothing less than ten percent. This however did not come about until the newspaper The Standard, in 1908, accused George Cadbury of acting indifferent to the “castigated African hands whose work was so essential to benefit the lucrative operations of Bournville”. Cadbury sued the newspaper for defamation and although he did win the battle after having proven that it was not until after threatening to stop buying cacao from occidental Africa when slave trafficking had stopped, the jury that was very conservative, put objections against this liberal and radical Quaker, and only offered a derisive compensation for harm and damage.

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