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Pleasing the plate

Hershey, which last year created green tea-flavoured "kisses" for the Asian market, will open a Chocolate World flagship store in Shanghai in the next couple of months.

The store will offer thematic activities, chocolate-making demonstrations, chocolate desserts, beverages and plenty of sweets, as it aims to promote its brand and become China's No.2 chocolate seller by 2010.

A handful of western brands, which began entering China in the 1980s, now account for more than half of China's chocolate market.

Local competitors such as Golden Monkey have found it hard to link their brands to an image of Western luxury and have mostly stuck to cheaper compounds using little cocoa butter.

Four players, Mars, Cadbury, Nestle and the Ferrero Group, controlled a combined 41.3 percent of the China market in 2006, according to Euromonitor.

Many Chinese buy chocolate only for gifts, not for personal consumption, as sweets occupy a special place in the country's tradition of gift-giving for special occasions.

Young people in Chinese cities, drawn by marketing campaign images of romance and western lifestyles, buy chocolates for Valentine's Day and Christmas.

Chocolate also competes with hard candies and hard-boiled "happiness eggs" as gifts for wedding guests.