McVities takes the biscuit with new chocolate recipe
McVitie’s has left chocolate digestive fans with a sour taste in their mouths after it quietly introduced a new recipe for its top selling biscuit brand – chocolate digestives.
The firm is heralding the new formulation as containing three per cent more chocolate than the old variety but this claim swiftly crumbled in the face of a Which? survey finding that they contained just one per cent more chocolate.
McVities officially launched the new look treats last week after quietly rolling them out to supermarkets in batches since December.
Connoisseurs claim that the new variety has a more even topping and less crunch however, sparking a campaign for United Biscuits, the manufacturer, to think again.
McVities are championing the new-look brand as having ‘wholemeal at their heart’ but Which? also found that each individual biscuit now contains 86 calories, versus 85 previously and also contains slightly more sugar, fat and saturated fat.
In a blind taste test conducted with 30 shoppers 19 preferred the old version.
A United Biscuits spokesperson said: “‘McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives are the Nation’s favourite biscuit. The British public love our biscuits so we have not reformulated the biscuit itself in any way or changed the “eat” of the product.
“We have just added on more chocolate, hence the “now with more chocolate” statement on pack to communicate this. The feedback we’ve had is that people like it.”