A famous 1981 French advert for Cadbury Fingers showed a boy hiding a box of the biscuits behind his back while his mother demands to know if he has eaten them all. “Non, non,” he insists, his nose growing, Pinocchio-like, with each denial.
The marketing slogan was: “Cadbury, the chocolate biscuit that doesn’t cheat.”
But today French finger-lovers are feeling decidedly cheated after discovering the biscuits have disappeared from supermarket shelves – and are unlikely to return.
“Give us back our Finger” ran the headline in Ouest France, France’s biggest selling daily newspaper, which lamented that Les Finger de Cadbury had been missing from supermarket shelves for months. “Where have they gone?” it demanded.
The national daily Libération wailed: “Cadbury Fingers have disappeared from French shops and nobody told us,” while the news channel BFM-TV took up the story of the “mysterious disappearance of Fingers”.
Le Monde, which said the news had left a “bitter taste” with customers and left nostalgic gourmets in a tizzy, sought an expert view of the “betrayal” from Sophie Thiron, a doctor in the sociology of food and emotions at the Jean Jaurès University in Toulouse.
Thiron told the paper: “We trust industrial brands to give us a precise taste standard with each consumer experience and an attachment is formed as a result of these pleasurable experiences. When Cadbury withdraws its Fingers without warning, the trust established with the brand is shattered.”
British shoppers may be surprised a chocolate-covered biscuit could inspire such grandiloquence, but the French fondness for Fingers has been likened to Marcel Proust’s madeleines, the taste of which transports the author back to his childhood. They were “the vehicle that gave us the possibility to travel to other times, other contexts or with people from the past has vanished”, Thiron said.
Le Monde also reminded readers that Queen Victoria was a fan of Cadbury products and gave the company a royal warrant in 1854.
But who is to blame? French journalists say Mondelēz International, the US company that owns Cadbury, has not replied to inquiries, while Lightbody Europe, based in Rennes in west France, which imports the biscuits, denies it is responsible for the disappearing digits.
Industry insiders have suggested the market for Cadbury Fingers has collapsed as cash-strapped families turn to cheaper own-brand alternatives.
A petition, which had been signed by just over 1,000 people at the time of writing, calls on Mondelēz, which also owns the Toblerone and Milka brands, to bring them back to France.
“Cadbury Fingers were taken from us in May 2024 … These delicious chocolate-covered biscuits were more than snacks to us, they were a tradition and a symbol of shared moments and pleasure. We value these little treats … we want our Cadbury Fingers back,” the petition states.
