McVities changes name of popular biscuit after removing vital ingredient
If you look closely at certain packets of McVities Digestives and Nestlé KitKats in the UK, you will see that a few changes have been made to their packaging that have sparked some concerns about the quality of their products. The Kit Kat Chunky White launched in September 2012, compared to McVitie's White Chocolate Digestives, which returned to the UK market permanently in July 2023 - after being discontinued in 2005 - due to popular demand.
Before their label of being 'white chocolate' biscuits, McVities Digestives and Nestlé KitKats are now simply 'white'. Shoppers have spotted these changes in some of their packaging products.
Interestingly, their product description has had some changes. Now, both McVities' Digestives and Nestlé biscuits have a 'white chocolate flavour' or 'white coating'.
McVities and Nestlé don't contain the required level of cocoa butter. To be considered as such, their products need to have a minimum of 20% cocoa butter, as per The Cocoa and Chocolate Products (England) Regulations 2003 act.
Similarly, McVities has also removed cocoa butter from the White Digestive recipe. Instead, it's now using a mixture of palm and sea fats to make the white coatings.
On the other hand, KitKat's Chunky White does contain cocoa-derived ingredients, including a fat-reduced cocoa powder, cocoa butter and cocoa mass. Still, palm and shea fats, which have a greater percentage of the recipe, are two ingredients used to make the white coating.
A Nestlé spokesperson told the Mirror: "The 'coating' description means we are accurate and compliant with how we describe the ingredient, which is made with vegetable fats rather than cocoa butter.'
Earlier this year, Nestlé removed the word 'chocolate' from their White KitKat packets, with McVities' White Digestive packaging doing the same recently. The cocoa butter got completely replaced with palm, shea and salt oils.
As previously reported, the price of chocolate has increased over the past few years due to poor harvests in West Africa, particularly in Ghana and Ivory Coast, where more than half of the world's cocoa beans get harvested.
Nestlé also stated that the increase in the cost of cocoa has made it much more difficult and expensive to manufacture its products, hence sometimes it has been necessary 'to make adjustments to the price or weight of some of their products.'
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