You've been eating choc Digestives all WRONG – McVitie's boss divides opinion by saying how you should consume snack
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CHOC DEBATE You've been eating choc Digestives all WRONG – McVitie's boss divides opinion by saying how you should consume snack
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MCVITIE'S boss has divided opinion by saying people have always eaten chocolate digestives incorrectly.
About 80 million packets are made every year, with all of the chocolate made in Greater Manchester.
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McVitie's boss has divided opinion by saying people have always eaten chocolate digestives incorrectly
Credit: Getty
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McVitie's lit up a series of London landmarks to celebrate the 100th birthday of the nation's favourite biscuit
Credit: Joe Pepler/PinPep
Anthony Coulson, general manager in Stockport, said the teatime staple was originally meant to be eaten with the chocolate-covered 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," explained Mr Coulson, who admitted he was a chocolate-on-top man.
The factory opened in 1917, with the chocolate digestive launched eight years later, about a quarter of a century after the plain variety.
The name was inspired by the belief that the baking powder in the recipe would help with digestion.
And although people might think of the chocolate digestive as being topped with chocolate, the company has said that as the plain biscuits pass through a "chocolate reservoir", the chocolate actually coats the underside of it.
Lynn Loftus, who has worked at the factory for 36 years, called the biscuit "timeless", adding that she thought it would be around for many years to come.
Craig Leech, who has worked at McVitie's for 21 years, started off in the factory by putting the chocolate on top of the biscuits.
"I just come in with a positive attitude. I know the people and the products inside out," said Mr Leech, who is now a planning manager for the refinery.
Alix Knagg, who has been working there for six months, said the chocolate digestive was "still a great product 100 years on".
Consumers have been quick to respond to the news and one exclaimed: "I've got to 55 years of age without ever thinking about whether the chocolate should be on top or at the bottom.
'So excited' say Cadbury Ireland fans as new chocolate bar flavour to hit shelves TODAY
"Not happy though that I've missed out on the 'world's most incredible debate'."
Another added: "But the image on the packet has chocolate side up. Even in the adverts.
"They'll be saying pizza is being eaten upside down soon."
"I solve the problem by never eating one at a time and "sandwiching" 2 together, either chocolate to chocolate or biscuit to biscuit.
"Go on, do it, you know you want to!" joked a third.
Meanwhile, London's most famous landmarks were lit up with dazzling light projections to mark 100 years of McVitie's Chocolate Digestives.
The London Eye became a towering tribute with a jaw-dropping 360-degree rotating projection of the beloved biccie.
Tower Bridge joined the biscuit birthday bash with a rolling showreel of fireworks, balloons and confetti. While County Hall followed suit, stopping the passers-by in their tracks.
The ambitious projections took eight weeks of meticulous planning and precision mapping to perfectly align the visuals onto each landmark using cutting-edge hologauze and projection wizardry.
Next up in the celebrations – The McVitie's Chocolate Digestives Experience – will open in London this May.
Set in Piccadilly Circus, the immersive concept store promises to be a biscuit-lovers' dream with bonkers bakes, must-have merch and Digestives-themed art.
Entry is free, and it's open for one weekend only – from Friday 2 May to Monday 5 May at Below the Lights, Piccadilly Circus.
Other Choccy News
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Cadbury Twirl Bites in Caramilk and also strawberry also launched last year
An iconic chocolate biscuit branded "Aussie gold" launched in UK supermarkets for the first time.
Chocolate fans were rejoicing because Tim Tams were finally available to buy across the country.
Originally inspired by British Penguin biscuits, Tim Tams were launched by Australian biscuit manufacturer Arnott's in 1964.
They're comprised of two chocolate biscuits sandwiched together with chocolate cream, coated in chocolate.
Three different flavours are now available including Original, Dark and Chewy Caramel and you can get them for £2.50 at Waitrose and Ocado.
Earlier this year, others yelled "it's a party in my mouth" as B&M rolled out a new M&M flavour also only seen in the land down under.
The retailer is stocking a Mocha Mudcake version of the classic snack after launching it down under in July last year.
Now the quirky flavour has landed in B&M, with shoppers keen to snap it up.
Instagram page Newfoodfindsuk posted a photo of the 130g bag of sweet online with almost 150 giving the post a like.
Cadbury Twirl Bites in Caramilk and also strawberry also launched last year.
Eagle-eyed foodies spotted the treats, titled "Aus Twirl" in B&M.
Retro food fans will also be pleased to know that some of their favourite "nostalgic" snacks are back on the shelves.
Most people have a favourite chocolate bar or crisp flavour they would love to see return - and we can now reveal some that have.
Aldi made biscuit lovers' dreams come true when it revealed it was bringing back the beloved Elkes Sports Shortcake biscuits.
Cadbury's iconic gold coins made a return to the supermarket shelves last September.
Nestle brought back the Quality Street fan favourite for Christmas last year.
The Hazelnut KitKat Chunky has made a return to the shelves after three years and shoppers can't get enough of it.
Plus, Morrisons started stocking Marmite crisps in February this year after Walkers announced it would be discontinuing the flavour.
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Fans were rejoicing when Aussie favourite Tim Tam landed in the UK
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Daily Mail
26-04-2025
- Daily Mail
The surprising secrets behind Britain's favourite biscuit, as McVities chocolate digestive turns 100
Every morning, for the past ten years of mornings, I have eaten a dark chocolate digestive biscuit. I don't really know how or why this habit started, but it did. I eat my daily digestive before I eat anything else and it is – I am convinced of this – good for me; it's structural, grounding. Also, it's not, actually, excessive. Each morning I limit myself to just one solitary biscuit, cold from the fridge, broken in half and eaten in bed. But one morning earlier this month, I was faced with millions and millions of them – and all before midday. To explain: this week the McVitie's chocolate digestive turns 100. To celebrate I visited the company's factory in Harlesden, Northwest London – the second largest biscuit factory in the world. The largest is the Chicago factory of Nabisco, whose biscuits include Oreos. McVitie's factory measures 50,000 sq m, the size of seven football pitches; Nabisco's is 170,000 sq m. At Harlesden, wearing a hi-vis vest and hairnet, I walk around the site with Nina Sparks and Fraser Jones, two McVitie's managers who have worked at the company for 27 and 28 years respectively. I ask how many chocolate digestives they think they eat in a week and Jones says, in a wistful voice, 'Well, I weighed about 11 stone when I started here.' Sparks remembers being pregnant and developing an intense craving for Rich Tea biscuits. 'I would go down the lines and just look at them. Rich Teas got me through my pregnancy.' The factory is open 24 hours a day, 362 days a year – Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day excluded – and most of the around 600 staff work 12-hour shifts, two days on, two days off. It produces 13 million chocolate digestives a day, as well as 12 million plain digestives, ten million Rich Teas, four million Chocolate Hobnobs, and 50 million Mini Cheddars. The latter tumble out of a gigantic oven like coins from a slot machine. Making a chocolate digestive works like this. First, the ingredients arrive by truck at the factory. While the chocolate obviously comes from abroad (often Ivory Coast), the base ingredients are harvested in Britain. The batter consists of, roughly, plain flour, wheat flour, vegetable oil, sugar, raising agents and salt, and it is prepared in two enormous mechanical food mixers. (The presence of fats and additives means a dark chocolate digestive scores a 'bad' 18/100 on the food rating app Yuka. But this neither bothers nor surprises me, given it is a delicious chocolate-covered biscuit.) Once mixed, the batter plummets down a tunnel, is flattened by a machine into a dough, then cut by another machine into 67mm-wide discs. Any excess dough is collected and transported up an electric helter-skelter where it is reused. After it's been stamped with holes to stop it from over-rising, the biscuit travels by conveyor belt into an 85 metre-long oven, moving forward constantly as it cooks. Here, Jones suggests I try a biscuit, fresh from the oven and straight off the factory line. Quickly, I pick one up. It's so hot it hurts to hold. It tastes fantastic. A man in a lab coat approaches the conveyor belt and plucks a biscuit off it, too. He is a quality checker and he does this every 15 minutes – taking a cooked biscuit to a special station, where he analyses its colour under what looks like a microscope, then crushes it up in a bowl, prodding a rod-shaped gadget into the granules and assessing its moisture levels. On the conveyor belt, the biscuits keep advancing – through a cooling machine and then over what look like rows of miniature train tracks, bubbling with liquid chocolate. This step of the process covers the biscuits' undersides in a bumpy layer of chocolate, which, Jones explains, is partly aesthetic (the ridges catch the light) and partly practical (it increases the chocolate's surface area). McVitie's refines and tempers its chocolate at the company's Manchester factory, transferring up to 60 tons of it a day to London. The lorries go in the middle of the night to avoid the traffic. The next stage of biscuit-making is complicated. Until now, the chocolate digestives have travelled on the conveyor belt as a mass, but in order to get into packets they need to be separated into several uniform lines. So they move off the conveyor belt and on to a sloped metal track, which is divided into lanes. As they slide downhill, the biscuits gain speed and bump against each other, falling naturally into place. There are tricks to reduce friction – cold air, for instance, is blasted underneath the metal track – but there's trouble if even one biscuit gets stuck. It can cause a pile-up that can lead to thousands of damaged and unusable biscuits. I ask Jones if he can recall the biggest biscuit car crash of his career. How many chocolate digestives might have been crushed at this stage in the process? He umms and ahhs. A lot? He gives an almost imperceptible nod. 'I'll leave it at that.' From here, everything is mostly done by robots. They wrap the biscuits in plastic (16 per pack), then put the packets in boxes, the boxes on pallets, and the pallets in trucks. The whole process – ingredients arriving, biscuits being made, products being shipped – is dependent on all of its parts functioning. 'We had this discussion during Covid: if the world comes to an end and everything stops, how long can we keep running for with the stock we have?' says Sparks. 'We landed on 18 hours.' McVitie's began in Edinburgh in 1839 with a baker called Robert McVitie. But it wasn't until 1892 that the company began selling digestives. It's unclear who exactly invented the biscuit (records suggest digestives were first made by a duo of Scottish doctors in 1839, who claimed the bicarbonate of soda present in the recipe aided digestion). Either way, McVitie's made it popular. And in 1925, employee Alexander Grant had the sense to coat a plain digestive with chocolate. Today, McVitie's sells £157 million worth of chocolate digestives a year; according to the firm's data, one in three British households consumes a £2.25 packet a week. Of those, around 80 per cent are milk chocolate and 20 per cent are dark. Out of interest, I looked at Sainsbury's customer reviews for McVitie's milk chocolate digestives. And, while it may be strange to leave a review for the most famous biscuit on earth, they're all positive; 313 in total and a 4.7-star average. 'Very good and crunchy,' says one. 'What a brilliant biscuit!' says another. When I leave the factory, I say to Sparks and Jones that I don't think I'll ever eat my dark chocolate digestive in the same way. And the next morning, as I have my ritual biscuit, I think about the process that brought it here: the flour being harvested in the fields, the tons of chocolate travelling down the motorway at night, the conveyor-belt oven, the packaging robots. The fact that, as I break the biscuit in half, all of this is happening right now, and will continue to happen every second of the day until Christmas Day, is a bit dizzying and also amazing. As that wise reviewer put it, what a brilliant biscuit! McVITIE'S IN NUMBERS £2 billion The price paid by Turkish company Yildiz in 2014 to acquire United Biscuits, which includes McVitie's. 1902 The year McVitie's opened its Harlesden factory in London. 6.5 minutes Amount of time a digestive takes to cook (at 280C). 47 years The time its longest-serving employee has worked at the factory. 0.6% The waste McVitie's creates a year. It resells faulty biscuits to animal-food companies.
Belfast Telegraph
25-04-2025
- Belfast Telegraph
McVitie's boss says we're not eating our chocolate digestives the right way
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'.
Daily Mail
24-04-2025
- Daily Mail
You're eating chocolate digestives all wrong: McVitie's factory boss reveals 'proper' way to enjoy your biscuits
With their more-ish chocolate topping and crunchy base, Chocolate Digestives have for years been ranked among the nation's favourite biscuits. But Britain's biscuit enthusiasts have likely been enjoying their favourite teatime treat incorrectly for years, a McVities factory boss has revealed. For decades, legions of tea-dunkers have savoured Chocolate Digestives with the biscuit side facing down. But in the latest twist in the fraught, years-long debate, Anthony Coulson, general manager at McVitie's chocolate factory in Stockport, has declared the beloved biscuit should be eaten with the chocolate side facing down. The astonishing revelation looks set to split generations of fans of the Chocolate Digestive, which was first rolled out in 1925, eight years after the the Stockport factory opened its doors. 'It's the world's most incredible debate, whether you have the chocolate on the top or the chocolate on the bottom,' the factory boss told BBC Radio Manchester. Mr Coulson, who said he preferred chocolate-on-top, added: 'One of the very first things I learnt when I got to join McVitie's was chocolate side down to eat the digestive. 'Now up until then I'd always eaten it the other way round.' But in an apparent bid to pacify thousands of flabbergasted biscuit eaters, he added: 'You can do it exactly how you want to do it.' The genesis of the Chocolate Digestive happened roughly 25 years after the plain biscuit and two years before McVities launched the Jaffa cake An astonishing 80 million packets of the humble teatime staple are produced every year, with the chocolate made in Greater Manchester. The genesis of the Chocolate Digestive happened roughly 25 years after the plain biscuit and two years before McVities launched the Jaffa cake. Despite the biscuits often being referred to as chocolate-topped, McVities has disclosed the plain variety actually go through a 'chocolate reservoir' and the chocolate is slavered on its underside. McVitie's marketing director Kerry Owens previously said: 'When we make our McVitie's chocolate biscuits – whether that be Chocolate Hobnobs, Chocolate Digestives, or even Jaffa Cakes – they go through a reservoir of chocolate on the production line. 'This essentially "enrobes" the bottom in chocolate - so we can confirm that the chocolate is officially on the bottom of the biscuits.' In 2021, a study by the University of Oxford sought to settle the controversial debate, finding that people should pick up the biscuits with the chocolate side up, but flip them over before eating them. Researchers said this technique helped the brain register the chocolate layer and then turning thm over before indulging boosts the 'oral-somatosensory experience' of the chocolate melting on the tongue.
