The owner of chocolate brand Cadbury is to return more production of its popular Dairy Milk brand to its historic 19th century manufacturing site in the UK.
The owner of the brand, Mondelez International, announced a £15 million ($20.4m) investment at its Bournville plant in Birmingham that will see some production shifted from continental Europe.
The company said that from 2022, 125 million more of the bars will be manufactured at Bournville, a model village set up in the 1870s that allowed workers to move out of city-centre slums and enjoy better conditions.
The move to the company’s “historic home” was welcomed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a tweet.
His government last year announced a new strategy to tackle the UK's “obesity time bomb” with nearly two-thirds of adult Britons overweight. It said the urgency of addressing the issue had been brought to the fore by evidence of the link to an increased risk of serious illness and death from Covid-19.
Bournville produced 35,000 tonnes of Cadbury Dairy Milk in 2020, the Birmingham Mail reported. It said a small number of bars would continue to be made in Ireland, Germany, Hungary and Poland.
Mondelez International, a multinational with $27 billion of revenues in 2020, owns other chocolate brands including Oreo, Toblerone and Milka.
