At the time Angus Kennedy, editor of Kennedy’s Confection magazine,told the Daily Mail: "To replace Bourneville with Toblerone is unpatriotic. It’s like replacing the fish in fish and chips with mussels."

A spokesman for Mondelez insisted Toblerone was only a "guest" during Christmas. But the Bournville bar is still missing.

9. Axing Christmas chocolate gift to pensioners

One of the perks of working for Cadbury, one of the great ethical Victorian firms set up by Quakers, was that you were looked after in retirement. Long-term former employees were given a gift of chocolates at Christmas. Not much, admittedly, but a small recognition of their years of service. Up to 14,000 would get these parcels.

Mondelez scrapped the gifts, claiming it needed the money to help plug the company's pension black hole.

One pensioner, Ray Woods, who worked at the Bournville factory in Birmingham for 36 years until 2004, said: "The cost of this cutback is peanuts. To link it with plugging the gap in the deficit in the pension fund is laughable.

"(The parcels were) a way of somebody taking the trouble to say 'you worked for Cadbury for a long time.'

"It's tinged with sadness for me, and I think that a lot of people will think the same way.”