New to Australian shelves, a Cadbury & More chocolate block range launched in the UK in 2024. After success there, the stylish range hits our shores with some reimagining of the & More' branding and with it a brand new block format (!). New formats are of great value to us as consumers, but expensive to implement on the production side. So, from the outside this indicates Cadbury has really gotten behind the new range, providing a much needed dose of actual ‘new’ to the chocolate aisle.
Hot, heavy metal. Not the kind of term you normally associate with the now staid dessert, the Creme Brulee. But throughout it’s contested history, that goes back to the late 1600s, Europeans were caramelising sugar on top of custards with hot metal. A fire-driven red-hot flat shovel, and later a flat iron disc attached to a long handle (curiously named a ‘salamander’) were held down on sugar to create the golden crown.
Our conception of the restaurant dessert of the same name has a much more recent genesis. Are the early origins French, Spanish, or from good-old mother England? For our modern conception, it turns out that in the 1980s an Italian owner of a French restaurant in the United States went to Spain and had a similar dish ‘crema catalana’, and on return wanted something similar to be served in his restaurant.
As the restaurant was French, this new interpretation was given a French monicker, and went back around the globe to become famous all over the western world.
Will Cadbury’s latest take on one of the world’s best known, and most loved desserts crack the surface of our expectations? Today, we will find out.
Positioning / Trend
Cadbury’s attempts at more premium positioned products (think Lindt and Ferrero as the established brands in that spot) have historically fallen flat. Either not premium-feeling enough, or just not eating great, the market leader’s attempts to extend market share in premium have time and again been left strewn across the battlefield.
With Cadbury & More (apart from a naff name), the Purple Don has loaded the range with it’s complete arsenal: a suite of higher-end dessert-inspired flavours (Creme Brulee, Tiramisu, Raspberry Cheesecake, Hazelnut Praline), dairy milk AND marble AND caramilk shells, higher quality soft fillings and nicely designed premium crunch inclusions.
Caramel Creme Brulee hits this positioning sweet spot, but can it deliver?! Let’s find out.
Looks / Design
First impressions of the range left me thinking “oh, they’ve gone and done it again” - another attempt at the premium market that’s off the mark. The pack design should be lauded for trying something different, but the tone of the colours felt off to me, and the strange name, and as the blocks are rounded at the sides the graphic design of the Cadbury brand name is cut off - making it initially hard to tell what this even is, added up to an uneasy first look.
But the gold of the Creme Brulee flavour is great on its own.
Slipping into relaxation mode in the evening, sliding open the smooth-as-silk opening on the pack, to see beautiful reflective foil in royal purple with gold detailing shining back at me in the dimmed light was a real treat.
The human experience element of new products is something I feel has been strongly de-prioritised over the last decade and it was a great delight to have this surprise lighting up my neurons on opening.
New moulding alert! Next, you notice the block has a completely unique design, with pleasing curves, patterns in the surface of the chocolate, and best of all it does this while also working functionally: you can break the rows and squares off neatly. Something not all new block designs manage to do.
Dissection
Bite through the curved chocolate bit, and meet a layer of caramel, a thick layer of creme brulee flavoured white chocolate ganache, and salted caramel chips. The block is nice and thick on the base and thick enough on the top outer layer to combine for a nice ‘snap’ when cracking off a row, without any crushing of the top layer.
The Eat
Reading the description of the engineering of this block above, you might be hesitating - caramel sauce, on thick white chocolate sauce, with caramel pieces, and caramel ‘caramilk’ chocolate - this could be a sweet-on-sweet-on-sweet disaster.
But the balance the creatives at Cadbury have deftly managed here across all of these flavours - combines for my mind to be the most enjoyable and exciting chocolate launch I have tasted this decade.
Mouthfeel (how it feels in the mouth while eating) is spot on, and while the caramel crunch pieces inside are salted - it’s subtle and doesn’t overpower the caramel, unlike so many others that fail on this point.
Opinion: Fun / New / Innovative?
Given my praise of the eat of this chocolate, the evaluation of this element is tricky actually.
We are talking about another portrait-oriented rectangular chocolate block here. We have seen layers like this utilised most recently by Cadbury themselves in the (for me, slightly haunted) ‘Slices’ range. Caramel sauces and salted caramel pieces are very not new.
Creme brulee as a dessert is almost a ‘sigh’ when you see it on the menu at the restaurant, as you’ve had it so many times and it’s been everywhere for basically as long as you can remember.
But.
Creme brulee as a flavour is not that common in the chocolate aisle.
And somehow, the flavour balance executed here does make me excited and feel like this is innovative. Is it in bringing such craft and execution in delivering the flavour experience we can see a new type of innovation for supermarket brands to chase? The innovation of exquisiteness with no visible corners cut, without the experience perceptibly diminished under the violence of profit maximisation?
Can you work under the constraints of no new ingredients and through culinary skill and ambition deliver something that cannot be denied?
How we would love to see more of that.
Overall
Dare I say, with this product the design team have managed to elevate beyond the chocolate block to deliver something that could genuinely be classed as ‘dessert’ in and of itself.
Not ‘inspired by’, not ‘dessert-style’, but goddamn art - actual dessert.
As you can tell I was so impressed with this. I won’t be as generous to others in the range, but this one truly deserves accolades. I hope it manages to stay with us over time, regardless of what happens with the rest of the range it came in on.
This one’s going on the top shelf.
