The $1,600 Gold Candy Bar: Big Spender

LONDON (TheStreet) -- There's a subset of Americans that handles imported Cadbury(CBY) chocolate like a precious commodity. Few, however, treat it like gold.

Just as Cadbury rebuffed Kraft's(KFT) $16.7 billion bid in early September and invited a potential hostile takeover, the company rereleased its caramel-filled Wispa Gold by offering one bar wrapped in gold leaf for more than $1,600. If Cadbury feels Kraft undervalues its product, it feels quite differently about a fan base who petitioned and pleaded for a return of a candy they grew to love in the mid-'90s before it was scrubbed for the utilitarian Dairy Milk in 2003.

Cadbury chocolate is often more elusive and expensive for its cult following in the U.S.

In the U.S., where the Wispa is virtually nonexistent and the Dairy Milk is contracted out to Hershey(HSY), Cadbury is known by Anglophiles as the maker of the dark chocolate they adore and by the rest of the populace as the company behind those Easter-centric cream eggs. Cadbury and American chocolate makers Hershey and Ghirardelli began making non-baking, confectionary chocolate within decades of each other in the mid-1800s, but the divide between them is as broad as that between two other U.S. and U.K. innovations of the time: baseball and soccer.

"When discussing differences between European and American chocolate, it is not a matter of the quality of basic ingredients," says Guy Crosby, a food scientist at Harvard University. "It primarily comes down to preferences: Europeans have preferred dark chocolate, while Americans prefer milk chocolate."

Like Premier League Football, Cadbury chocolate is often more elusive and expensive for its cult following here in the States. Though Hershey frowns on sales of Cadbury favorites like the nut-and-raisin-packed Picnic and airy, fragile Flake (occasionally sending stores cease-and-desist notices), British and Irish specialty shops are more than happy to help cocoa-addled customers relive their semester abroad at a premium. At London Food Co. in Montclair, N.J., for example, Cadbury's caramel-packed Curly Wurly is its Web store's best seller at $1.20, with a crunchy cookie Time Out going for $1.75 and a bag of treat-sized Flake offered for $9.75.