Three years ago, in the UK, there was a bit of an outcry. The chocolate bar that most of Britain had grown up eating had started looking different. And the British believed that it was tasting a bit different too. Chocolate major Cadbury had changed the shape of its top selling Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (CDM) apparently in a bid to reduce the grammage.
When the flat, brick-shaped slab of chocolate emerged in a rounded avatar, the stiff upper lip of the English twisted into a frown - the company had tampered with the taste, which the company was quick to deny.
Earlier this week, India witnessed a somewhat similar deviation. Except that it’s too early to tell how the market reacts. For decades, the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk that most of India has been eating comes in a neatly arranged brick shape, except when the cooler at your retailer is not working. That traditional shape was maintained even when CDM launched the Silk variant, a few years ago.
But, Mondelez (the company that owns the Cadbury brand) had other plans.
When it launched a variant under the CDM franchise, Marvellous Creations, the new product came in a shape that cannot be defined even by the best student in your geometry class.
With no one piece in the same shape or size, each piece in a chocolate bar conceals either jellybeans, chocolate gems, or cookie nuts beneath. Imagine the cacophony if you are surrounded by children who want an equal share. And what if you were a jelly fan but got a chunk of chocolate with gems.
To be sure, chocolate makers have been experimenting with shapes for decades. Yowie produces panda-shaped chocolates in Australia while Cadbury itself had introduced Caramello Koalas way back in the 1960s.
In Russia, a couple of years ago, Nestle experimented with hollow heart-shaped chocolates. Called ‘s otkrytym serdtsem’ (open-hearted), it was released under the brand ‘Rossiya – Schedraya dusha’. Each chunk of chocolate has a little heart carved into it.
When Depot WPF, the agency behind the packaging design of the product did some research, it showed that Russian consumers found the new shape of the chocolate bar unusual and intriguing and it attracted a lot of interest. The agency statement says that during tests, however, it emerged that even if the product was presented on the packaging in a fairly obvious way, potential clients did not always appreciate what makes it so special.
“Although design is usually fundamental to the aesthetic, functional and structural characteristics of products, there is limited research on how shape triggers preference decisions,” says renowned academic Marvin Berkowitz’s research on product preferences.
But the change in shape plays on the sensory factor and goes a long way in influencing the taste of the product. In the case of the British CDM, research that has been documented by the BBC showed that consumers complained the new product was sweeter and immensely disliked it.
However, Cadbury continued to insist the recipe remained unchanged and it was only the shape that was new. Research showed that the shape influences taste due to speed of melting and surface area. Shape could also alter the order in which food molecules are released into the mouth playing a strong role in influencing taste.
Try telling that to your retailer who still sells mangled chocolates in the Indian summer.
Diksha is currently an intern with the Hindu Business Line