Cadbury Bournville > Reviews (19)

"Bournville... ville as the wind blows..." - oops, sorry; I got a bit carried away there. Let's get on before I embarrass myself any further, eh?

I should really have written this review last year, since 2008 marked the centenary of one of Cadbury's oldest chocolate brands, Bournville. Ironically, despite being named after the famous Birmingham headquarters of the company, this bar is actually made in France! That particular bit of outsourcing can't be blamed on Kraft. It's available both in small bars weighing 45 grams (as so often, these have shrunk slightly in recent years, the company choosing to do this in the hope that nobody will notice rather than take the more honest option of simply increasing the price) or large slabs of 200g. The slabs cost around £1.40 in supermarkets, much better value than the 55p or so charged for the small bars.

Up until a couple of years ago, the Bournville bar benefited from an extremely attractive wrapper design, still visible in some of the example pictures here on Ciao: deep, metallic red with the brand name in classy gold lettering and the simple description above the ingredients list: "Chocolate." It looked the very picture of understated elegance. Sadly it seems since to have been got at by silly marketing types, and the wrapper is now a far less impressive lighter and non-metallic red colour with a strange chocolate-brown splodge at the top as though someone had thrown a glass of drinking chocolate at the wall. It's not even close to being as good. Oh well, at least they resisted the temptation to scrawl purple stripes all over it....

Still, I suppose I can't go on complaining about that for the entire review, so let's have a look at what's on the wrapper and in the bar. It is dark chocolate, but only just, its 39% cocoa solids being not much above the 35% minimum mandated by the EU. In spite of this, however, it does contain a "milk ingredient"; this is a strange form of words, but presumably refers to the listed butterfat. The presence of this, and "traces" of egg, means that Bournville is not vegan, although it is suitable for vegetarians. Allergy sufferers should also note that it "may contain traces" of nut and wheat. A 200g slab of Bournville contains exactly 1,000 kcal, so I wouldn't advise eating it all in one sitting!

As you'd expect from a Cadbury product, the Bournville bar has a smooth texture and feels rather sugary, without the bitterness common to much dark chocolate. Despite the presence of the butterfat, it does taste surprisingly similar to a Dairy Milk without the milk; it has a pleasant and distinctive, almost smoky, aftertaste that lingers for quite some while. This does mean that it's not always the best bar to eat with food, although it does seem to match up quite well with a related flavour such as provided by a cup of coffee. The lowish cocoa percentage makes the bar less demanding on the palate than a lot of dark chocolate, and so a couple of chunks of Bournville can make a nice comfort food.

Nobody is going to mistake Bournville for a premium-quality, high-cocoa dark chocolate: it lacks the depth and sophistication of a bar made by hand by a dedicated chocolatier, and the very presence of butterfat on the ingredients list will lead some to look down their nose at this product, just as they would do when confronted with British milk chocolate and its dreaded vegetable fat. The fact is, though, that it is not fair to compare them directly: they are two different products, just as are fish fingers and smoked salmon. As with the fish, both types of chocolate can be welcome in different circumstances, but neither one can directly replace the other.

Aside from the feeble redesign of the wrapper, there isn't a lot wrong with the Bournville bar. It's not perfect, in that the smaller bars really are just that little bit *too* small and the company might do a bit more to eliminate some of those potentially-allergenic "traces" in the production process, but as long as you can live with that and the overseas production base, this bar fills a niche - for "easy eating" dark chocolate with a relatively sweet, mild taste - which it still has more or less to itself.

[This review may appear elsewhere, under the same username.]