Cadbury Bournville Classic Dark Chocolate - 180g

A Name With an Address

When George and Richard Cadbury moved production out of Birmingham city centre and into what was then open countryside, they built not just a factory but a whole village for their workers, complete with houses, gardens and, in keeping with the family's Quaker convictions, absolutely no public houses. The village took its name from the Bourn brook nearby and a French word for town, and that name eventually attached itself to a chocolate bar. Bournville the bar is a product tied to a place, which is not something you can say about most confectionery.

The Purple, the Rivals and the Lawyers

Cadbury adopted purple as its colour in 1905, the same year Dairy Milk launched, partly as a nod to Queen Victoria, who had died four years earlier. That particular shade became closely enough associated with the brand that Cadbury later trademarked it for chocolate packaging, a decision Nestle contested in court. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Cadbury sat alongside Rowntree's of York and Fry's of Bristol as the three dominant forces in British confectionery, a trinity that shaped what a whole country expected chocolate to taste and look like. Cadbury is now owned by Mondelez International, which was spun off from Kraft Foods in 2012 following Kraft's acquisition of Cadbury in 2010, a piece of corporate history that generated considerable feeling among people who take their biscuit tins seriously.

What Bournville Actually Is

Bournville Classic Dark is not an aggressively dark chocolate in the way that some bars seem to want to test your endurance. It sits at a level most people find approachable: enough cocoa depth to feel genuinely different from milk chocolate, not so much that you need a lie-down afterwards. It is the chocolate people reach for when they want something that tastes like a considered choice rather than an impulse. Whether that makes it sophisticated or just quieter than everything else on the shelf is probably a matter of mood.

The Expat Cupboard Problem

If you grew up in Britain, Bournville is likely in your memory somewhere: broken into squares after dinner, used in baking that only sometimes went to plan, or sitting in a grandmother's kitchen as the chocolate that was not for children and therefore immediately more interesting. It is not the bar you grabbed from the newsagent on the way home from school. It is the one that felt like it belonged to adults, which gave it a certain status that a Freddo could never quite match.

Still Worth Finding

Dark chocolate does not travel as badly as sentiment does, but finding the right version of the right bar still matters. The 180g size is enough to share or to not share, which is a decision Bournville leaves entirely up to you. For anyone in Canada who knows this bar and misses it, or who is buying it for someone else who does, The Great British Shop keeps the proper UK version available so the cupboard does not have to go without.