And so begins the usual diet of faint jingoism and hazy nostalgia. By offering £10bn for Cadbury, Kraft has sparked a round of reminiscing about confectionery the British have known and loved – and which may fall into the hands of those rapacious Americans. Flake! Wispa! Creme Eggs! Inevitable perhaps, since nearly everyone who has ever been a child will have chewed their way through a Cadbury product – or will remember those ads telling them to thank Crunchie it's Friday, or about how the faintly shady man in the black polo neck went to so much trouble all because the lady loved Milk Tray. But there was a time when Cadbury stood for a different way of trading. It was one of a batch of Quaker firms which had a stranglehold on the chocolate business: Cadbury of Birmingham, Rowntree's and Terry's of York – and the granddaddy of them all, Fry's of Bristol. Indeed, Joseph Fry is credited with making the first-ever chocolate bar. Barred from Oxford and Cambridge and Westminster, ingenious Quakers had few avenues apart from commerce, and in that too they would not do anything unethical. Hence chocolate. These were businesses distinguished by decent treatment of workers. Joseph Rowntree built on 150 acres of New Earswick, while the Cadburys' Bournville village had a library – but never a pub. It may sound paternalistic, but back then such provision was genuinely radical. Now those old Quaker chocolate firms stand as a memory of a more humane way of doing business.