They are some of the most beloved and iconic chocolate bars in the UK – but they’re not chocolate bars any more.
A string of chocolate or biscuit bars have recently seen their recipes watered down or downgraded to the point they can no longer legally be called chocolate, including McVitie’s Penguin and Club bars and Nestle Toffee Crisp.
In the UK, the legal definition of milk chocolate is that it contains at least 20% cocoa solids and 20% milk solids.
But as the price of cocoa has risen, several bars have had recipe changes to pump in more palm oil or other fillers. If the recipe then drops below those numbers, they can no longer be labelled chocolate.
Penguin bars for example, are now described on the packaging as “chocolate flavour cream filled biscuit with a milk chocolate flavour coating.”
Club bars have also had their recipe downgraded and ironically, it’s led to the famous slogan being changed to reflect that too. “If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit”, is the well known advertising jingle, but it’s now been changed to “If you like a lot of biscuit in your break” because it’s no longer a chocolate biscuit by legal definition.
More recently, Nestle’s Toffee Crisp bar and Blue Riband biscuit bar have both been reclassified, just a few months after Kit Kat Chunky White dropped the word ‘chocolate’ off its packaging too.
A spokesperson for Nestle told BBC that the food giant had seen “significant increases in the cost of cocoa over the past years, making it much more expensive to manufacture our products. We continue to be more efficient and absorb increasing costs where possible”.
The downgraded list:
longer be marketed as “milk chocolate” (or never could be):
1. McVitie’s Penguin bar
2. McVitie’s Club bar
3. Nestlé Toffee Crisp
4. Nestle Blue Riband
5. Nestle KitKat White
Despite some confusion, Creme Egg is still made with milk chocolate. It underwent a controversial recipe change a few years ago when new owners Kraft decided to swap out its classic Dairy Milk formulation for a cheaper mix, but it’s still legally milk chocolate.
