Good news: eating bars of Dairy Milk is no longer greedy – it’s snacking with a social conscience.

Monday morning was just another shift for workers at Cadbury’s Dairy Milk factory at Bournville, in the West Midlands. They worked studiously – oblivious to the mouth-watering smell of molten chocolate – as bars whirred past on conveyor belts, 400 a minute, 24,000 an hour, more than 500,000 a day. But although it looked like business as usual, the company was quietly undergoing one of the biggest changes in its nearly 200-year history of chocolate-making, as the first Fairtrade bars rolled off the production line.

Quakers

Britain’s biggest-selling chocolate bar becoming a Fairtrade product is the equivalent of finding the golden ticket for a movement that has been at the fringes of the retail sector for the last 15 years. In one swoop, the distinctive black Fairtrade mark (albeit next to the Rorschachian 2012 Olympic logo) will be placed under the noses of consumers in 30,000 shops across the country in the coming days.

Sitting under stern portraits of the Cadbury family, whose Quaker values shaped the business, Trevor Bond, its UK managing director, said making Dairy Milk Fairtrade is a “first step”.

“This is 300m bars of chocolate a year – that’s massive change for everyone, and has taken time to organise. We will go as fast as we collectively can.”