Product type Confectionery Country United Kingdom | Owner Cadbury Discontinued 2006 United Kingdom | |
Introduced 1996 United Kingdom
2015
(Promotional relaunch of 100 bars)
2016 India | ||
Fuse is a brand of chocolate bar currently manufactured by Cadbury in India, originally produced in the United Kingdom. The original product was unusual for being a 70% solid bar of milk chocolate with the remaining 30% containing suspended within it nuts, peanuts raisins, crisp cereal and fudge pieces rather than having these ingredients simply coated with chocolate.
The bar tested very well in research, with 82% rating it as excellent or very good and 83% proposing to purchase it regularly.
Fuse was the subject of a large marketing campaign leading to a national rollout of the product on "FuseDay" - Tuesday 24 September 1996.
The unusually large marketing campaign was the subject of a documentary by TV Choice Ltd - The Marketing Mix at Cadbury's (1998).
Forty million Fuse bars were sold in the first week of release. The brand was discontinued in 2006.
As of early 2010, there are various campaigns in progress to see its return to the shelves.
In October 2015, Cadbury launched a Twitter campaign, #CadburyCraveyard, where fans could tweet the hashtag or comment on a qualifying Facebook post for which chocolate bar, out of Fuse or Marble, they wanted to resurrect for Halloween. The bar that proved to be most popular was Fuse, and it was then recreated using the same recipe and ingredients and distributed to 100 randomly selected winners. By July 2016 Cadbury had begun secret product testing and taste trials with select consumers across the UK to perfect the recipe prior to its public relaunch.
Mondelez Ltd., the manufacturer of Cadbury products decided to launch Fuse in India in September 2016 to better compete with Mars and Nestlé in the country's chocolate-coated peanut segment.
"I think now we have an opportunity here to create a premium product to what we had in 5 Star. I think Cadbury Fuse will do that for us and create a whole new segment," said Manu Anand, president, chocolate, Asia-Pacific, Mondelez International. It launched in an e-commerce portal, two weeks before it hit the shelves The Indian bar differs slightly from the original.