Cadbury chocolate fingers sell for €55 a packet as shortage bites

They may hark back to a quintessentially British creation, but Cadbury ­Fingers are also popular in France, where angry customers now feel “betrayed” by the biscuit’s noticeable absence.

Their disappearance from supermarket shelves has prompted indignant ­articles across the media, from the highbrow Parisian daily, Le Monde, to the regional newspaper Ouest-France.

At least two petitions are calling for their return. On Amazon, boxes that cost £1.80 in the UK are being offered to the French for €54.99 (£46), a price worthy of Pierre Hermé, France’s star cake-maker.

The biscuits were removed from French shops six months ago, but only became national news last week when Libération, the left-wing daily, said they had mysteriously vanished.

The newspaper said “regular nibblers [of Cadbury Fingers] felt betrayed”. It added: “It’s become almost impossible to find this little crunchy chocolate biscuit.”

Sophie Thiron, doctor of the sociology of food and emotions at Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University, in southwest France, said French consumers had trusted Cadbury to provide tasty biscuits. “When Cadbury withdraws its Fingers without warning, that trust is broken,” she told Le Monde.

Many observers say the biscuits have become a latterday madeleine, the French cake that brings back childhood memories in Marcel Proust’s celebrated novel, In Search of Lost Time.

Thiron said that without Fingers, a “vessel that enables a journey to other times, other contexts or with other people has vanished”.

Mondelez International, the American corporation previously known as Kraft Foods, which acquired Cadbury in 2010, attributed the halt to supplies to an “intermediary distributor”.

It added: “We are actively working on options to reintroduce the beloved Cadbury Fingers to the French market.”

Libération said the distributor was Lightbody Europe, based in Brittany, which said that Mondelez International had been responsible for removing the biscuits from supermarkets.

Either way, the episode is being viewed by the French left as evidence of the pitfalls of the market economy. On the internet claims that “wild capitalist” forces are at work fail to mention that if John Cadbury, the founder, had not embraced the market economy when he opened his grocery store in Birmingham in 1824, Fingers would probably not exist.

Mondelez has sought to reassure Britons that there will be “no impact” on the UK market.