Rumours are circulating the Internet that claim chocolate company Cadbury is renaming their Easter Eggs to “Gesture Eggs”.
TLDR: What’s true? In some rare cases, retailers and independent stores include the term “gesture eggs” to describe a specific premium range of Cadbury’s Easter Eggs.
What’s false/misleading? The term dates back to 2016 and isn’t employed by Cadbury itself, and there is no evidence that the term “Easter” is being suppressed or replaced by the company.
The rumours appear to have first surfaced from a photo posted by Twitter account ForRotherham (update: account has since been deleted) in January 2018 that appear to show a Cadbury poster offering so-called “Gesture Eggs” in an unnamed store, along with the caption that “Easter in finally shutdown“. A copy of the [now removed] tweet can be seen below. In 2024 the rumour was reignited when the UK’s Conservative Party reposted the same allegations while linking to an article from The Daily Mail.
A copy of the 2018 tweet from ForRotherham –
Easter is finally shutdown.
I won’t be buying any “Gesture Eggs” #boycottCadbury
What the f##k is a gesture egg anyway?
I’ll only be buying the ones with Easter on them what about you?@ForBritainParty @AMDWatershttps://t.co/Gm8Hw0iYm4 pic.twitter.com/RGGvlomsKZ— ForRotherham🇬🇧 (@ForRotherham) January 27, 2018
The 2024 post from The Conservative Party –
In both the above cases, the allegation is that Cadbury is renaming Easter Eggs as Gesture Eggs.
Firstly, no, Cadbury is not suddenly renaming their Easter Eggs “Gesture Eggs”. The term “Gesture Egg” appears to have first been used back in 2016 as an ostensibly unofficial term for Cadbury’s higher, premium range of Easter Eggs. The first reference to the term “Gesture Eggs” is from packaging design company Design Bridge when discussing the 2016 range of packaging for the chocolate company –
The purple egg key visual provides a consistent expression of Cadbury Easter revelry to the range while remaining flexible for use on different product types. It has been adapted for the packaging of Cadbury sub-brands with strong individual personalities, such as Cadbury Mini Eggs and Cadbury Creme Eggs. For Gesture Eggs, Cadbury’s range of sophisticated Easter eggs at a higher price point, the Chick and Bunny characters and green landscape have been replaced with gifting cues, such as elegant yellow-gold ribbons, to create a more premium feeling. Elements of the key visual have also been incorporated onto the packaging for Cadbury Easter novelties, which include mini chocolate hollows and small chocolate eggs.
Despite the reference to Gesture Eggs, the term never really gained any momentum to describe a premium range of Cadbury Easter Eggs. In fact a search of the term on the Cadbury website back in 2018 (and again in 2024) yields precisely zero results for the term, nor does it on the Cadbury parent company website Mondelez.
Nor does the term seem to appear on any of the official social media channels belonging to Cadbury.
The term Gesture Egg does appear to still be used, however, to describe some of Cadbury’s premium eggs, albeit comparatively rarely. For example, The Daily Mail article that the UK’s Conservative Party linked to in 2024 included an apparent photo of an in-store poster featuring the term “Gesture Eggs”. However after reading the entire article, it appears it was an isolated case since the photo was taken at an independently operated store in Spalding, Lincolnshire, and didn’t describe any widespread usage of the term.
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Other retailers, including supermarket Morrisons, also used the term Gesture to describe Cadbury’s premium version of Easter Eggs, though notably they also include the term Easter as well (see screenshot below).
So is Cadbury removing the term Easter and replacing it with the more-secular term “gesture”? No, this claim is highly misleading. For a number of years the term “gesture” has occasionally been used to describe a specific range of Cadbury Easter Eggs, but the term isn’t used by Cadbury itself and is only rarely used by other retailers or independently run stores. The term Easter, on the other hand, is frequently employed by Cadbury, and the term is often found on the packaging of its chocolate range, and on the Cadbury website, and on its social media channels.
A spokesperson from Mondelez, the parent company of Cadbury, told us –
All Cadbury Easter shell eggs sold in the UK reference Easter very clearly on the packaging – sometimes multiple times. Cadbury has used the word Easter in our marketing and communications for over 100 years and continue to do so with our new Easter product range. To claim anything otherwise is factually incorrect.
This appears to be yet another extension to the on-going nonsense that there is some kind of “war on Easter” that we see every year around this time, that usually consist of claims that supermarkets are banning the word Easter or that Easter is no longer displayed on the packaging of Easter Eggs. Such claims are all based on nothing but propaganda and scare-mongering, and can be dismissed by even a cursory glance at the Easter Egg selection in any supermarket. We discuss these hoaxes in more detail in our post here.
As for this nonsense, no, Cadbury is clearly not replacing “Easter Eggs” with “Gesture Eggs”, and anyone can confirm this for themselves by searching the website or looking at the official social media channels of the chocolate company.
