Cadbury Creme Egg sales plummet after controversial recipe change

Sales of the iconic Cadbury Creme Egg have dropped by more than $8 million since the company changed the recipe last year, reports BuzzFeed News.

All in all, Cadbury parent company Mondelez International has lost more than $14 million dollars in sales of all Cadbury Eggs since the company made the controversial decision to alter the Creme Egg recipe. Sales for Creme Eggs dropped 7% for filled eggs and 11% for shell eggs in 2015. 

The biggest change, reported last January, was that Cadbury's Dairy Milk (traditionally used in the eggs' shells) had been substituted for "a standard, traditional Cadbury milk chocolate."

Mondelez International has maintained that the change was minor. The company told BuzzFeed that the "fundamentals of Cadbury Creme Egg remain exactly the same," and that the sales decline was not connected to egg-related outrage.

However, when the new recipe was announced last year, the backlash was swift and vast. People took to social media to condemn Cadbury for ruining "the best thing about Easter," and to call the change a "devastating effect of US imperialism."

Much of the outrage was directed against Kraft, which acquired Cadbury via hostile takeover in 2010. A BuzzFeed poll after the new recipe was announced indicated that 76% of respondents (more than 18,000 votes) were disgusted by the change, and believed that the "Great British Creme Egg has been ruined by some Americans."

Mondelez has recently been focusing on building its healthy snack portfolio, as opposed to the chocolatey Cadbury brand. In September, Chief Growth Officer Mark Clouse announced the company plans to focus 70% of new product development efforts on healthy offerings in the next five years.