If your favourite chocolate bar is Toffee Crisp or Blue Riband, you may have to pick a new one – as according to the rules, they’re not actually chocolate.
Nestlé’s latest ingredient change took both treats’ cocoa solid content below the UK standard for a product to officially be labelled as chocolate.
The confectionery giant reformulated the iconic bars as a cost-saving measure, reducing cocoa mass in favour of a higher ratio of vegetable fats.
In Britain, it can only be lawfully described as milk chocolate if it contains a minimum 20% cocoa and 20% milk.
And although Nestlé hasn’t revealed the exact percentages in its new Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband recipes, they’ll no longer meet this threshold following the update.
As a result, the product descriptions for both bars have been updated to say they’re ‘encased in a smooth milk chocolate flavour coating’ rather than being covered in ‘milk chocolate’.
Toffee Crisp was originally launched in 1963, while Blue Riband has an 89-year history after being launched in 1936.
Nestlé confirmed it had ‘recently updated the recipes’ for both.
‘These changes have been carefully developed and sensory tested with taste and quality being our top priority at all times,’ a spokesperson told Metro. ‘As always, we keep our ingredients up to date and clearly labelled on pack, so confectionery fans can continue to enjoy our products with confidence.’
Explaining the reasoning for the move, they added: ‘Like every manufacturer, we’ve seen significant increases in the cost of cocoa over the past years, making it much more expensive to manufacture our products.’
Cocoa solids content of popular UK chocolate bars
Cadbury Dairy Milk: 20% minimum
Cadbury Bournville: 36% minimum
Mars Galaxy: 25% minimum
Nestlé Yorkie: 25% minimum
Tony’s Chocolonely Milk: 32%
Lindt Classic Recipe Milk: 30% minimum
Green & Black’s Milk: 37%
Kinder: 32% minimum for milk chocolate, but 13% total cocoa constituents
When it comes to supermarket own-brands, the milk chocolate offerings from Sainsbury’s and Tesco both contain 31% minimum cocoa solids, while Asda advertises a 27% minimum for its bars and M&S has options ranging from 35% to 38%.
The company went on to claim that while it was continuing to ‘be more efficient and absorb increasing costs where possible’, it’s ‘sometimes necessary to adjust the recipes of some of [its] products’.
It also noted ‘there are no plans to make the same change across [its] other chocolate products’.
The latest in a string of cocoa-cutting victims
Kit Kat Chunky White suffered the safe fate at the start of this year when Nestlé changed the packaging to say ‘white’ instead of ‘white chocolate’.
Again, it no longer contained the minimum amount of cocoa solids to be lawfully described as white chocolate in the UK. Kit Kat multipacks were also reduced in size from nine bars to eight, and 21 bars to 18, to cut costs.
The same goes for McVitie’s White Chocolate Digestives, which were renamed ‘White Digestives’ by manufacturer Pladis, while its Penguin and Club Biscuits also downgraded to ‘chocolate flavour’ after cost-cutting measures saw cocoa solids drop below the minimum.
The Cadbury conspiracy
As news broke that various treats couldn’t be called chocolate anymore, it breathed new life a long-standing myth that Cadbury Dairy Milk had also had the term removed from its labelling – one many Metro readers wrote in to tell us about.
It’s a rumour doing the rounds on social media too, with numerous posts on Facebook and Reddit saying its cocoa content has been reduced to the point ‘it doesn’t meet the criteria’ and ‘is no longer allowed’ to be referred to as such.
Unfortunately for the gossip train though, this is simply not true, with the word featuring on the flagship product’s packaging and marketing materials alike.
The misconception seems to stem from the fact EU regulation requires milk chocolate to have at least 25% cocoa solids, meaning Dairy Milk – which has 25% – can only be sold on the continent if it’s labelled ‘family milk chocolate.’
Here in the UK however, as mentioned the Cocoa and Chocolate Products Regulations 2003 stipulates a lower minimum of 20% cocoa solids, so it’s just within the rules (and well above the US’s 10% requirement).
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