In the run-up to Easter, tucking into a Cadbury Creme Egg is one of life’s simpler pleasures. Made from the brand’s signature milk chocolate and with a gooey fondant centre lurking inside, there’s a deliciously good reason why the sweet treats have been a staple on shop shelves since the ’60s.
In fact Brits love them so much it’s reported they consume around 400 million Creme Eggs each year. Given the humble treats are only sold between Boxing Day and Easter, the nation’s love for Creme Eggs is something to behold – Cadbury even unveiled a 3ft version of the treat that was roughly the height of an emperor penguin.
But before you crack into your next Creme Egg, if you can resist temptation it’s worth taking a moment to look closely at the wrapping to discover a hidden code on the wrapper. While fans waste time examining the wrapper before diving in, creators at Cadbury have now explained what the secret codes on the wrappers mean.
When they’re wrapping 50,000 eggs an hour, there has to be some sort of organisation, and luckily for the workers (sadly not Oompa Loompas), they don’t have to be the ones to wrap them. The eggs are wrapped at record speeds by one of four machines, and there’s a secret indicator that shows staff which ones have been wrapped by which gadget.
Each egg has the letter ‘W’ printed on it, along with a number from one to four under the best before date. So if you look closely at your egg, you will be able to trace it all the way back to the very machine that wrapped it.
One of the Cadbury chocolatiers told the Daily Star that making the iconic Creme Eggs is not like any other type of chocolate and it’s done in a “clever” way. David Shepard, Product Developer of the Mondelēz International Research and Development team said: “The Crème Egg is made in quite a unique process, it’s not like a normal chocolate bar. Normally in a chocolate factory when you have a filling, like a Crème Egg, you make a chocolate shell, you set the shell and put the middle in.
“But actually for the Crème Egg, it’s clever how it’s done. Basically, you deposit the goo centre, the yolk and the white, into liquid chocolate and it very cleverly pushes it out. We call it displacement. That’s the only product I know that does that. It’s put into moulds and the two halves come together – it’s fantastic. You think it will make a complete mess, but it doesn’t.”
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