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

This is the U.S. version. It didn't change. Don't freak out. (Morton Fox)

This is the U.S. version. It didn’t change. Don’t freak out. (Morton Fox)

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]

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