McVitie's boss says we're not eating our chocolate digestives the right way

Belfast Telegraph

25-04-2025

Anthony Coulson is general manager at McVitie's chocolate refinery and bakery in Stockport, Greater Manchester, which opened in 1917 and has produced chocolate digestives ever since they were invented eight years later.
But despite more than 70 million packs being sold every year, Mr Coulson believes fans of the biscuit – including himself – have been eating them incorrectly.
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Coulson said the biscuit was originally supposed to be eaten with the chocolate side facing down.
'It's the world's most incredible debate, whether you have the chocolate on the top or the chocolate on the bottom,' said Mr Coulson, who eats them with the chocolate on top.
McVitie's, which first began as a small shop on Edinburgh's Rose Street in 1839, first developed the recipe for its digestive biscuits in 1892.
It is credited to an employee named Alexander Grant.
The biscuits go through a reservoir of chocolate which enrobes them so the chocolate is actually on the bottom of the biscuits and not on the top
Named in reference to the belief that the inclusion of baking powder could aid digestion – as touted in an 1851 issue of The Lancet medical journal – the chocolate variety of the biscuit was then introduced by McVitie's more than a quarter-of-a-century later, two years before the creation of Jaffa Cakes in 1927.
It is not the first time McVitie's has sought to flip the narrative around the method in which its prize product is consumed.
In 2014, an email purportedly sent by a United Biscuits spokesperson, which was then circulated on social media, said: 'For your information, the biscuits go through a reservoir of chocolate which enrobes them so the chocolate is actually on the bottom of the biscuits and not on the top.'
Contacted by the media at the time of that assertion, a McVitie's spokesperson was quoted as saying: 'The McVitie's stamp is on the other side, which is the top of the biscuit.'
As they mark the biscuit's 100th year, employees at the Stockport factory were reported to have expressed their belief in the biscuit's enduring popularity.
Lynn Loftus, who has worked there for 36 years, described it as 'just timeless', while Alix Knagg, who has spent six months at the factory, said the chocolate digestive was 'still a great product even after 100 years'.