“Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best”? Manufacturing “Purity” in the British Cocoa and Chocolate Industry, c.1850–1939

Beginning with the famous advertising slogan for Cadbury’s Cocoa, “Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best,” this article examines how British cocoa and chocolate manufacturers shaped evolving meanings of food purity to their advantage across legislative and commercial domains, from the 1850s until the eve of the Second World War. The article applies a cultural history lens to discourses of food adulteration produced by government-appointed select committees, contemporary publications in newspapers, journals and magazines, advertising materials, and extant corporate archives. Through close readings of these texts, the article argues that the purity of cocoa and chocolate became guaranteed less by unadulterated closeness to colonial-sourced cocoa beans and more by the complicated manufacturing processes, hygienic factories, and employment practices of the large confectionery manufacturing firms. These firms traded on their trusted reputations – linked implicitly in the case of Rowntree, Cadbury and Fry, to their Quaker family origins, and to paternalistic treatment of a white, female-dominated factory workforce – to influence contemporary legal, commercial and popular definitions of “pure” food. In the context of public anxiety over food safety in the period 1850-1939, manufacturers attached gendered, racialized and classed meanings of “purity” and “safety” to cocoa and chocolate as commodities, and to the processes of their production, which enhanced their status as nutritious yet always distinctly industrial foods.