Remember Cadbury's white Creme Egg Hunt last Easter when almost 1,000 white chocolate eggs were hidden in stores across the UK?

The hunt sent chocolate fans wild as they tried to get their hands on a golden ticket to be in with a chance of winning up to £10,000.

But how did Cadbury do it? The secrets are being revealed in a Channel 4 documentary - and it's much more mysterious than you might imagine!

First, a group of chocolatiers snuck into the Bournville factory in the middle of the night (yes, really!) and made up the mystery batch.

Then, they hid them in a secret location before travelling the length and breadth of the country to ensure they were distributed fairly. Undercover chocolate dispatchers were sent into stores to surreptitiously slip the disguised eggs in amongst the regular milk chocolate ones ready for lucky shoppers to find.

BirminghamLive spoke to Jeremy Stern, CEO of PromoVeritas, the company behind the cunning plan to find out just how they did it.

"We went into the Cadbury factory in Bournville at midnight when no-one was around to make the special white Creme eggs," said Jeremy, who was talking to us from Seattle.

"Then we took them to our testing facilities and hygienically wrapped them to make sure they looked identical to the regular milk chocolate eggs, except these ones had golden tickets inside."

Watch how traditional Cadbury Creme Eggs are made:

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"Myself and my senior team selected stores in proportion to the balance of sales. So, for example, if Tesco sold 20 per cent of sales, they would get 20 per cent of the mystery eggs."

He added: "We then worked out a route and drove around the country doing a Controlled Prize Placement or CPP, going into each store making sure they had a good stock of regular eggs and placing one of our mystery eggs onto the shelves. Some people call it reverse shoplifting but I don't refer to it as that because shoplifting is totally illegal and what we do isn't at all.

"We don't tell the store what we are doing and we don't tell the Cadbury staff at the factory either. In fact I heard some of the staff there were mystified as to how the white Creme Eggs were made at all."


Each golden ticket contained a unique serial number and a phone number for the person who had found the ticket to call through to PromoVeritas. Winners received up to £10,000.

"Winners always received their prize money plus 60 pence to cover the cost of the Creme Egg they bought," said Jeremy.

"They thought they were buying regular Creme Eggs and they got a white chocolate one instead so we sent them the money to get the egg that they chose.

"One winner called within half an hour of us dropping off an egg in Oxford. Normally it's not that fast. It happened whilst we were filming the documentary so the film crew went round to visit the winner. It was a young child who had bought the chocolate egg for his brother. The parents were happy to be interviewed and it turned out to be a touching story.

"Some of the prizes still haven't been claimed."

Take a look at our gallery of photos of Cadbury over the years:


PromoVeritas has worked with Cadbury for the past seven years, making sure that promotions are carried out fairly and legally. The company works with lots of different brands, such as Haribos, Old El Paso, Kellogg's and Pringles.

"On certain projects, we will put in the special tickets on the factory line but if you do that you don't know where the products will end up," said Jeremy, who is based in London.

"If we'd have done that for the Cadbury White Egg Hunt it could have ended up as a geographical disaster with all the winning eggs ending up in a single store in Doncaster!

"We've never been stopped by a member of staff in a store, or by a member of the public when making our drop offs. It's very hard for them to see what we're doing.

"For the documentary, I wore a camera sewn into the button of my coat so that we could film what we were doing without anyone realising."

When making the dispatches, the team travelled from the Isle of Man to the Isle of White, over to Northern Ireland and into Scotland, making plenty of drop-offs in Birmingham on the way.

Jeremy said he once hid an 'IOU' note for £20,000 into a Cadbury chocolate bar in Norway and made Dairy Lea triangles that 'mooed'.

"We love being part of these promotions," he said.

"There was something about the White Creme Egg Hunt that really captured the public's imagination. It was great to think that we made it possible."

* Inside Cadbury: Chocolate Secrets Unwrapped is on Channel 4 at 8pm on Sunday September 15.