Carambar bought the brand in 2018 and it’s still a big seller in the UK with 9 million UK households buying a Terry's Chocolate Orange each year, making it one of the UK’s favourite chocolates, particularly at Christmas time.
Thomas Vanyoe is the export director for Carambar and earlier in the year in our video, he updated viewers on the brand, and also explained the continued popularity of the chocolate orange.
He said globally 44 million Terry's Chocolate Oranges are sold each year in countries including the UK, Ireland, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
The historic York factory, where Terry’s Chocolate Orange was invented, has now been developed into luxury apartments, and the brand was bought by US firm Kraft (now Mondelez International), in 1993 before the factory closed in 2005 and production was moved to Eastern Europe.
‘La boule’
Known as ‘la boule’, or ‘the ball’ in France, the new owners have launched ‘exploding candy’, ‘toffee crunch’ and white chocolate versions to appeal to customers in the US, Japan and China, as well as to tempt UK consumers to buy the product at other times of the year.
Vanoye said the new flavours had helped it nearly triple sales in the US. ‘It’s amazing – when we bought this brand we knew we had something iconic, but we couldn’t believe that it would have been such a great success,’ he told ConfectioneryNews. He also confirmed there had been no changes to the original recipe. Both the milk chocolate and dark chocolate versions have also remained unchanged in weight since 2016, at 157g.
But the new flavours are smaller, with toffee crunch at 152g and the exploding candy and white versions at 147g – and sell in the UK for approximately £1 each.
