With the nice, British Nick Bunker presenting the case for Kraft this week at the first media briefing since its acquisition of Cadbury in February, journalists found it hard to portray Cadbury as having been gobbled up by nasty, predatory Americans.

Which is exactly as Kraft wants it. We heard from Joe O'Shea, director of chocolate at Kraft's new Bournville Centre of Excellence, how he was now talking to people with expertise in dairy and biscuits and "for us, as innovators, that's very exciting".

Moving the centre from Munich also meant, instead of an R&D team of 100, there would be 500, offering young science graduates a more attractive career path.

It was the same on the coffee side. O'Shea's new equivalent at Kraft's coffee business, Jim Graham, is American, but he had come to Britain as a tea drinker, he told us (Marc Antony-like), and was already working on a Cadbury Dairy Milk cocoa variant for the Kraft Tassimo coffee machine. The possibilities for cross-collaboration were very significant, Bunker added: more important than the £750m in cost savings to be identified from synergies was the extra £1bn in sales he was expecting to generate from the greater sum of the parts.

The hostile takeover of Cadbury involved, Bunker conceded, a lot of emotion, and he also admitted that to be so faceless as a corporate entity in the UK had been a mistake for Kraft. In putting that right, he added there were more commonalities than differences between the two businesses, including marketing flair, and a strong commitment to sustainability and the community.

Cadbury is as British as Willy Wonka. Yet you'll not find many kids complaining when they watch Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp in the movie. The question is which Willy will we get?

So long as Cadbury keeps delivering on the magic, no-one will complain. With sales of CDM up 12.8%, it goes without saying that neither Bunker nor his US superiors have any intention of altering the recipe.

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