Academic scholarship on the representation of women in British screen advertising from 1955 onwards has focused on issues related to the housewife, domestic labour and gender stereotypes. Taking Cadbury’s advertising for its chocolate bar Flake as a case study, this article asks whether the hypersexualisation attributed to the late twentieth century television commercials was inherent in the brand’s first television campaign of the 1950s. It finds that it was not, and the sexualisation of the ‘Flake girl’ arose both from the development in the late 1960s of a cluster of production companies and directors in London emulating American film styles, and from the merger of Cadbury with Schweppes in 1969. The article examines representations of women’s work in the early chocolate television commercials of both the Quaker companies Rowntree and Cadbury, and finds that, contrary to popular assumption, they offered representations of female identity and value aligned to the early advocates of women’s rights, economic independence, and freedom from domestic labour.