Why did Kraft pay £11.7bn for Cadbury? Because Americans can't make chocolate...

I was going to blog about this and say pretty much exactly the same thing, before Toby Young beat me to it:

I remember the first time I bit into a Hershey Bar. It was the summer of 1976 and I was 12 years old. I’d never been to America before and the first thing I wanted to do on touching down at JFK was sink my teeth into one of these legendary chocolate bars. I was already a fan of American cuisine, being an enthusiastic early adopter of the McDonald’s outlet in Muswell Hill, and was confident American chocolate would knock our own into a cocked hat in much the same way that Big Macs were superior to Wimpy burgers.

I tore off the wrapper, bit off a sizeable chunk and began to chew greedily. Hang on a second … something wrong here … Where was that familiar hit of cocoa? The lovely sensation of squashing a square against the roof of your mouth? It tasted more like a bar of soap than a bar of chocolate. It seemed inconceivable that American GIs had been able to seduce nice English girls during the Second World War by proffering one of these bars alongside a pair of nylons. Next to this, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk was pure ambrosia.