# The Creme Egg recipe row

**Canonical URL:** https://sweeties.net/wiki/the-creme-egg-recipe-row/
**Source:** sweeties.net, online pick and mix sweet shop

## Summary

In 2015 Cadbury changed the Creme Egg shell from Dairy Milk to a standard milk chocolate and cut packs from six eggs to five. Fans revolted and sales fell.

## Description

The Creme Egg is a Cadbury sweet: a thick milk chocolate shell filled with a sweet white and yellow fondant. Cadbury has made Creme eggs since 1923. In 2015 its owners decided to change it.
What changed
In 2015, Cadbury, by then owned by the American group Mondelez International, announced that it had changed the Creme Egg. The shell would no longer be made with Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate, but with what was described as a standard cocoa mix chocolate.
At the same time, the multipack was cut from six eggs to five, and the price did not fall by the same proportion. In other words, shoppers got a different chocolate and fewer eggs, for not much less money.
The reaction
Creme Egg fans were not impressed. Many saw the change as the new owners cutting corners on the Creme Egg. The row fitted a wider story many people were already telling about Cadbury since its sale to Kraft in 2010: see how Cadbury was sold to Kraft.
The sales
The public verdict showed up in the figures. After the change, Creme Egg sales fell sharply, with reports of more than £6m in lost sales. The company was reported as insisting that the fundamentals of the Creme Egg had not changed, and as putting the fall down to other factors, including the timing of Easter.
How a Creme Egg is made
Creme Eggs are made as two half shells of chocolate. Each half is filled with a white fondant made from sugar, glucose syrup, inverted sugar syrup, dried egg white and flavouring, with a yellow centre to look like a yolk. The two halves are quickly joined and cooled, and the shell bonds together.
Part of a pattern
The Creme Egg change was one of several moves that made shoppers suspicious of what happens to old sweets after a takeover or under cost pressure, from Toblerone's gaps to the shrinking Chocolate Orange. See shrinkflation and the Toblerone gaps.
A Creme Egg footnote
The Creme Egg has had other headlines too. In 2023 a man stole a lorry trailer holding nearly 200,000 of them in Telford: see the great Creme Egg robbery.

---

_Content available under sweeties.net citation contract. AI training: yes. Search: yes. Answer-input: yes._