Sales of Cadbury dairy milk chocolate have gone up since the company changed the recipe, according to Cadbury New Zealand managing-director Matthew Oldham.
Although he would not provide figures, Mr Oldham said sales were higher than both last month and the corresponding month last year.
"I think maybe there's a lot of talk about chocolate and people are going out and buying and eating more than usual."
Cadbury's decision to reduce the amount of cocoa solids in its milk chocolate and add palm oil has drawn flak from some consumers and Mr Oldham acknowledged "quite vocal dissatisfaction" with the change.
"But I wouldn't say that's necessarily representative of what all consumers think.
"I suppose whenever we change anything in a product, particularly one that's so trusted and long-serving, there are going to be some people who embrace change and there are going to be people who just don't want anything to change."
Mr Oldham said the changes were made to improve the texture and the value of its milk chocolate blocks, and changing back to the old recipe was not in prospect.
"Really we don't see the reason to change. We have tried it [the new product] with hundreds of consumers. We're confident it's the preferred milk chocolate."
The change has occurred during Cadbury's restructuring of its operations in New Zealand and Australia, including a $70 million spend at its Dunedin plant.
The old milk chocolate blocks for New Zealand were produced in Dunedin.
The new ones are manufactured in Tasmania, using mostly "crumb" (milk, sugar, cocoa) from Dunedin but also including some from Australia.
"There's a whole strategy . . . We are confident that it's a better product for it, so we don't really see the chance of it ever changing back."
He said the new, slightly softer milk chocolate was developed specially to suit the tastes of New Zealanders and Australians.
"That won't necessarily be the same chocolate people in the United Kingdom or India or somewhere else may prefer. It is a different chocolate."
Mr Oldham said he was "disappointed" at plans by a new Dunedin group, Anti Palm-oil Enterprise (APE), to protest at tomorrow's Cadbury Jaffa race down Baldwin St, in Northeast Valley.
"The jaffa race is about raising money for charity. It's a fun event to feed something back into the community and I would say to have that distracted or mired by some form of protest . . . I think is a real shame."
APE spokeswoman Judith Curran said the group had "no intention of disrupting" the event but wanted to use the opportunity to educate people about what was happening where palm oil plantations were replacing native rainforest on the island of Borneo, which is part of Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.
Mr Oldham told the Otago Daily Times Cadbury shared the group's concerns over deforestation and the fate of orangutans.
"That's the reason why Cadbury has only purchased certified, sustainable palm oil. We don't really see that there's an issue to be protesting against Cadbury."
