Market Research Firm: Cadbury Creme Egg Sales Down £6 Million After Recipe Change Outside Of U.S.

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At this time last year, the rest of the world was freaking out over the prospect of a change to the recipe of Cadbury Creme Eggs. Here in the United States, we were safe from the recipe change, with our Hershey’s-licensed creme eggs remaining as inferior as they’ve ever been. However, researchers speculate that the recipe change cost Cadbury £6 million ($8.6 million) in lost sales.

The Easter candy season is apparently just now kicking off in the United Kingdom, since they don’t start putting out Easter candy in mid-December like Americans do. This news doesn’t come from Cadbury itself, but an outside market research firm, IRI, which looked into the egg situation on behalf of a grocery trade group.

Their research found that Cadbury’s Easter candy lines sold about £10 million less than would have been expected, putting most of the blame on the Creme Egg change.

Cadbury, for its part, insists that they never sold Creme Eggs in a shell of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate, and that all of this fuss over a recipe change is fuss over nothing. “The fundamentals of the Cadbury Creme Egg remain exactly the same as the original in 1971 recipe with delicious Cadbury chocolate and a unique gooey creme filling,” a spokesperson told The Telegraph.

Sure, this news doesn’t affect us directly, but it’s a reminder of an important consumer fact: don’t mess with people’s cherished holiday candy memories.

Cadbury loses more than £6m in Creme Egg sales after changing recipe [The Telegraph]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist