We're eating chocolate digestives the wrong way
But the boss of the factory that has been making McVitie's chocolate digestives for 100 years claims the nation has been consuming them wrongly.
Anthony Coulson, the general manager at the company's chocolate refinery and bakery in Stockport, said the biscuit was supposed to be eaten with the chocolate side facing down.
He told the BBC: 'It's the world's most incredible debate, whether you have the chocolate on the top or the chocolate on the bottom.'
About 80 million packets of chocolate digestives are made every year and it was named as the nation's favourite dunking biscuit in a 2009 poll.
It also previously came top in a university study to find the best dunking biscuit.
The digestive was first developed in 1839 by two Scottish doctors to aid digestion. And in 1925, chocolate was added for the first time.
Lizzie Collingham, the author of The Biscuit: The History of a Very British Indulgence told the BBC's World at One programme that Bath Olivers were the first biscuit to come out 'covered in chocolate' before the First World War.
She added: 'I think the delay for McVitie's is because the First World War gets in the way. And then in 1925 they come out and slather their digestives in chocolate.'
The centenary of the chocolate digestive's creation was marked with displays at London landmarks on Wednesday evening. A 360-degree rotating projection of the biscuit lit up the London Eye and Tower Bridge, where there was also a fireworks display.
Next up in the celebrations is a pop-up store – The McVitie's Chocolate Digestives Experience – which will open in London next month.
In 1998, Dr Len Fisher, a physicist and honorary research fellow at Bristol University, used a hi-tech Instron stress-tester to calculate the breaking point of different biscuits when dunked in hot tea.
Chocolate digestives were found to withstand at least eight seconds, compared to a mere three to four seconds for ginger nuts and Hobnobs.
The study found the chocolate coating protected the biscuit from the effects of the hot tea.
McVitie's divided opinion in 2013 when it changed the recipe for the biscuit, adding around 3 per cent more chocolate.
A survey by consumer group Which? at the time found that almost two thirds of shoppers preferred the original recipe, saying the new biscuit was less crunchy.
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