Cadbury Bournville

Posted by in Chocolate Reviews on April 20 2007 | Leave A Comment

Cabdury BournvilleWhen I was a kid, Bournville was my first and pretty much only exposure to ‘dark’ chocolate. A small bar of Bournville was a real treat for me.

These days, with all the wonderful dark chocolate on the market, my tastes have changed. Whether Bourneville has changed too I don’t know, but it just doesn’t appeal to me in the way it used to.

Cabdury BournvillePart of the problem is the cocoa solids content. At 39%, it’s not what I’d class as dark chocolate these days. It’s more of a halfway house between milk and dark.

It’s also very, very sweet. Hardly surprising, given sugar is right at the top of the ingredients list. To me, it tastes a little like drinking chocolate or cocoa powder mixed with sugar and water. It’s not an offensive taste, but it’s slightly artificial and has none of the bitterness you’d expect from a good quality dark chocolate.

I think the wrapper for this bar says it all. Cadbury call it ‘plain chocolate’ rather than ‘dark’, and the back is mostly taken up by a recipe – as well as an advert for Stork margarine (I don’t know anyone who has bought Stork since the 1970s!). It appears Cadbury see this more as a cooking chocolate than an eating chocolate.

I’ve probably just grown out of Bournville. If you think of it as a kind of ‘beginners dark chocolate” then it works, but if you’re expecting a high quality, bittersweet experience, then this isn’t it.

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Comments On This Post

  1. Chocoholic123

    off topic a little i thought i would ask who everyone’s fave choc manufactures is
    A:Cadbury
    B:Nestle
    C:Masterfoods?
    i have to say mine is nestle god bless nestle lol 😛 🙂 😉 😀

    • chandler

      i bought some bourneville hot chocolate for the family and nobody liked it so i put it into my favourite chocolate cake recipe and it won the record for being the worst chocolate cake on the planet what happened it used to be nice

    • Hattie

      Cadbury 🙂

  2. Katie

    Everyone buys Stork margerine – I bought some today!!

  3. Johny

    To be honest I hate chocolate, but when it comes to white chocolate it is a different story!

    Very nice site 🙂

  4. Leigh

    thats it!! it tastes exactly like drinking chocolate powder. Not that i resort to eating this. Not in company anyways.

  5. Mona

    I love Bournville like anything . It gives me a pleasure.But i hardly find it in India.I live in mumbai.please have them available here.Or at my address.Let me know if you can via email i ll forward my address.

  6. Mona

    Yummyyyyyyyyyyyyy

  7. Ujjayini

    Please be sure that Bournville again become available in the local stores of Kolkata. It will be more cool if with an added bitterness and less sweetness.

  8. I bought two bars of Bourneville chocolate today and it is the best chocolate on earth. The taste is perfect whereas Cadbury’s milk chocolate is imperfect.

  9. Bill G

    I have done my own comparison regarding Bournville.
    I used to love this chocolate. I don’t know if Cadbury are using a marketing ploy with this product based upon how it I think it used to be. I’m sure they used to call it dark chocolate. Apparently now it is plain and if by that they mean boring they are right. Everyone I have asked to name Cadbury dark chocolate have named this product. When I discovered it had such low cocoa solids I was shocked, especially its price.

    I have personally discovered that ASDA own smart price product is superior in every way. Cocoa solids min 50% and so it tastes great. Excellent for cooking too. At the time of writing it was 30p/100grm. Bournville is 75p/100grm

    And no I don’t have any connection with ASDA as pretty much the only thing I buy from them is this chocolate.

  10. Teresa Hayes

    We are advised to eat dark chocolate for better health.
    The only dark chocolate available in Ireland is Bournville which is very hard to bite into.
    What about dark soft chocolate bars.

  11. sunil raghavendra

    nice ad plz can give me link to down load

  12. I find green & blacks dark chocolate, the 90% cocoa product, gives the ultimate bitter taste. I am a huge fan of dark chocolate and as you stated started off with bournville and immediatley catagorized this as dark. Now i have ventured into other brands bournville just doesnt appeal to me anymore. I find either green & blacks 90%, or Lindt dark is very nice.

  13. Margaret

    I love Bourneville dark chocolate especially with a cup of coffee. It is wonderful melted with strawberries and you can use a little cream with it if you like. Bourneville is wonderful as an ingrediant for baking good chocolate cakes. My heart sinks when I think of Cadburys being sold to an outsider like Kraft. So I now won’t buy it.

  14. I like Cadbury, if only for the fact their rep listened when told how disappointing it was to pick up a bar of ‘dark’ or ‘plain’ chocolate only to see milk in the ingredients list. So unlike Mars, whose ‘dark’ Bounty still contains milk.

  15. @ Ian Slade: I wouldn’t know how nice Lindt’s dark chocolate is since they didn’t start producing it until after I called a boycott on their products over their financial support of a ‘charity’ that’s well known for its eugenicist research.

  16. BOB

    I was brought up with Bounville as the only available “dark chocolate” (as printed on my wrapper), so have come to like it out of habit, like Heinz tomato soup.
    So I find the continental chocolate a bit unpalatable, maybe not sweet enough, or maybe its bitterness of the much higher cocoa content than the 36% in Bounville. (again printed on my wrapper). Having learned the health benefits of the higher cocoa content chocolates, I’m looking for a palatable replacement which doesn’t contain ingredients with more bad qualities than good.

  17. Jer: Maybe I need to make this Nik at Nite’s cake week. My wedding cake was the best cake EVER. Until I saw yours. That was true awonemesess. Erin: How to top that cake? I suggest a life-sized Desmond cake. And then invite me. 😉 joshua: Send away!!

  18. Joy

    I was looking for cocoa content for Bournville, and came across this site. My husband and I love Bournville, we eat four squares every day for dessert, with our coffee. We were given dark chocolate Easter eggs and they are 70% cocoa, and totally inedible, we tried but they are so bitter. Give us Bournville every time…….so velvety smooth, a real tongue cuddle and such a treat.

  19. Clive

    Ugh… my wife bought me a small bar of this as a treat, but oh how it has changed from what I remember as shiney bitter-tangy fine chocolate. I looked at the wrapper, small black text on dark red, hard to read, but yes only 36% cocoa solids now – I note that your headline says 38% and I guess they are lowering it by degrees so that it tastes more like American “candy”. Sorry, but they have ruined what used to be a lovely taste, I’ll stick to premium dark chocolate if I need a fix. Bye Bourneville !

  20. avichal

    Amul dark chocolate is better than bournville. It is cheaper and has 55% dark chocolate with lesser sugar!

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