Let’s get cracking…
For centuries, eggs have been symbolic of Easter. They represent rebirth, the start of new life, and, long before the invention of chocolate, hen’s eggs were often decorated with paint and given as Easter gifts. As beautiful as painted eggs are, I love a good Chocolate Easter Egg.
The selection of Easter Eggs available these days does not disappoint! As I often make clear, I have a huge love of British things, especially chocolate, so when it comes to Easter Eggs, it’s the British-made ones that I crave the most, especially Cadbury!
Memory Lane…
When I was about 14 years old, my family went on a trip to England to visit relatives that lived in Cookham. Cookham is a beautiful little village in Berkshire and to this day I can vividly remember the sweet shop there! It was called Pauline’s. Our cousin Karen introduced my sister and me to the sweet shop and we would often stop by on the way back from a countryside walk.
We could spend ages at Pauline’s looking at all the sweets and chocolates to choose from. My favourite thing to get there was Cadbury Mini Eggs, which they sold loose, not pre-packaged. They were about the best thing I had ever tasted and ever since then I have been smitten with Cadbury Easter Egg products! Check out my recipe for Cadbury Mini Egg Brownies.
First appearance of Chocolate Easter Eggs in the UK…
Cadbury came out with their first Easter Egg back in 1875 but it was J.S. Fry & Sons that produced the first Chocolate Easter Egg in the UK in 1873. Early chocolate eggs were made using dark chocolate but in 1905, Cadbury launched their Dairy Milk Chocolate. Milk chocolate had a huge impact on the Easter Egg market as consumers loved the added sweetness.
Packaging also played a big part in revolutionizing the Chocolate Easter Egg market. In the 1950s William Horry was designing a carton for fragile electric light bulbs when he realized the potential of a similar carton for marketing fragile chocolate eggs. The new packaging also offered the opportunity to attractively display the eggs in brightly coloured cartons to potential buyers.
The Popularity of Chocolate Easter Eggs…
Chocolate Eggs are so popular today, that the UK Easter Egg market alone is worth £220 million, with sales growing every year as new and tempting products appear!
The Cadbury Creme Egg appears to be the most popular Easter Egg item today, with over 500 million produced every year. Two-thirds of them are sold and eaten in the UK and the rest are exported. The Creme Egg first appeared on the market in 1971 and in 1994, it was joined by a newcomer, Cadbury’s Caramel Egg, which is also a popular choice these days. Cadbury says that the number of Creme Eggs bought in the UK every year is the equivalent of 3 1/2 eggs for every person in that country. That’s not many…is it? Asking for a friend. 😉
For many years, the production of Easter Eggs was labour intensive but by 1955, Cadbury had installed a fully automatic chocolate Easter Egg machine in Bourneville. Progress has continued since, and today, production is computer controlled. The Creme Egg facility in Bourneville produces up to 1.5 million Creme Eggs per day!
Endless Choices…
From fabulous Cadbury selections like Dairy Milk Buttons, Twirl, Oreo, Whispa and Heros to Nestle Orange Smarties Egg or a Mars Maltesers Egg, the variety of Easter Eggs seems endless these days…and that is just the UK part of the chocolate egg market!
If I had to choose, the Cadbury Twirl Egg would be the winner. What’s Your Favourite Chocolate Easter Egg?
Fun Facts To Finish…
- If you laid all of the Cadbury Creme Eggs produced every year end to end, they would stretch all the way from Bourneville, UK, to Sydney, Australia!
- If you pile the same number of eggs vertically, it would be three times higher than Mount Everest! I might even start climbing in my spare time if a chocolate mountain existed!
Special thanks to Limey, The British Shop in Victoria, British Columbia for having such an AMAZING selection of proper Easter Eggs and letting me take some photos for this post. ❤️
I may or may not have consumed a “few” Easter Eggs during the writing of this post. Product research is a must!
