I was on a mini holiday in York last Sunday when Elaine, our witty guide for Tommy’s Tours, gave us some fascinating details about the chocolate industry in Europe that I have to share with you.
Did you know that KitKat is the bestselling chocolate bar in Europe, and that the UK is the biggest chocolate-eating nation in the world? There are five KitKat plants here, with one just for the KitKat Chunky. Amazingly, there are 14 tonnes of KitKats produced in York every hour.
Apparently, York should be called ‘Chocolate City’, as there are so many different sweets and chocolate bars produced here, from Dairy Box to After Eight, to Lion Bars and Fruit Gums. For economic reasons, production of some products has been outsourced; Smarties, for instance, are now manufactured in Croatia, while the bubbly Aero bar is produced in West Germany (even though some 17.5 million Aero bars are consumed in its original home market).
Producing 49 million bars a week (that’s seven million bars a day and 14 tonnes of chocolate every hour), the plant has its own chocolate tasting department. Imagine that! It also develops new flavours all the time, with 75 flavours of KitKat for the Japanese market, including soy sauce and green tea.
As Elaine said, you can’t talk about York without talking about chocolate’s No 1 family, Rowntree, in particular Joseph Rowntree and his son Seymour.
Rowntree’s sweet factory was bought by Switzerland-based Nestlé a few years ago, but the neat and tidy area of subsidised garden housing set up by the company still remains. It all began in 1893, when Joseph Rowntree made a survey of the city and found so many people living in poverty that he built a Quaker village for those on a low income, not just those who worked for the company. This has now become a part of the city, but it’s still a ‘dry village’ with no pubs; the public voted to keep it this way in a recent vote.
He donated £10m to this housing scheme, but with many restrictions. He insisted that every house had a garden and a vegetable plot, plus an apple tree and a pear tree. As demonstrated by the increasing number of food and drink companies with an ethical heart, it looks as if altruism and productivity can go hand in hand, and many have been doing so for quite some time.
Let me know about your company’s best ways of caring for the community. It’s heartwarming to spread the good news for a change.
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