Cadbury Old Jamaica Rum N’ Raisin from Australia

My brother was once invited over to a friend’s house for dinner.  That friend’s wife cooked up a lasagna that my brother said was one of the best vegetable lasagnas he’s ever had.  Was she using the finest imported Italian cheeses and sauces and premium noodles?  Anything but.  Everything she used was low priced off-the-shelf ingredients.  It was the simple combination of these low tier ingredients that created the delicious recipe.

The Old Jamaica Rum N’ Raisin from Cadbury (Australia) is a similar example.  It’s made from Cadbury’s decent but not stellar quality “dark” chocolate.  At 37% cocoa solids, it doesn’t contain much more cocoa solids than higher quality competitors’ milk chocolate offerings. No chocolate connoisseur would call this real dark chocolate.  And in the last year in the press, Cadbury Australia has been ripped a new one by its consumers when it reduced the size from 250g to 200g, while keeping the price static, of course, and then substituting cheaper vegetable oils for cocoa butter, claiming all the while that consumers wanted this.  It’s decent chocolate in the scope of being a Cadbury brand.  In a taste test comparing Cadbury products from 7 different countries, Cadbury Australia’s chocolates rated second. Open up that competition to include all brands of chocolate, Cadbury Oz’s range become footnotes.