Drinking Chocolate in a French Supermarket

There is a range of drinking chocolate  powders available in my local SuperU supermarket. They do their own brand, and there are the two French classic brands, Poulain and Banania. Plus a few other multinational brands, but no Cadbury's in sight.

The Poulain product is called 'Grand Arome' ('big scent') and is manufactured in the Touraine Loire Valley, where the company began, in the mid-19th century. The standard product is 32% cacao, made with cocoa sourced in Africa, and the rest is sugar from beets grown and processed in Europe. There are a few variations, with less sugar and more cocoa. It costs around €12 a kilo.

Chocolat Poulain was created in 1848 by Victor-Auguste Poulain, a confectionary maker from Blois. Since 2017, the company has been owned by Carambar, a French company specialising in confectionary that also owns the brands Terry's, Kréma, pastilles Vichy and Suchard, with five factories in France. The emblem of Poulain is a foal, as the word 'poulain' means 'foal'. The first Poulain boutique was in the former family home in Blois of the magician Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, now open to the public as the Museum of Magic.

Along with Suchard (1826) and Menier (1836), Poulain is amongst the oldest chocolate brands in France and the first to engage in widespread image rich publicity campaigns. They also printed educational images which were offered free with their products, and introduced the idea of random half price vouchers which were distributed amongst their packaging for some lucky consumer to find by chance.

Banania was created in 1914 by journalist Pierre-Francois Lardet after a trip to South America where he encountered indigenous women making a drink from banana flour, cacao, cereal and sugar. It quickly became the market leader, largely thanks to generous donations of the product to the soldiers on the front line, and the use of a Senegalese sharpshooter as the brand emblem. After the Second World War though this overt association with colonialism became controversial and Poulain and Nesquik were the market leaders. Banania has struggled ever since to maintain its market share and in 2019 it closed its last factory in France. The product is now made in Germany.