With their more-ish chocolate topping and crunchy base, Chocolate Digestives have for years been ranked among the nation’s favourite biscuits.
But Britain’s biscuit enthusiasts have likely been enjoying their favourite teatime treat incorrectly for years, a McVities factory boss has revealed.
For decades, legions of tea-dunkers have savoured Chocolate Digestives with the biscuit side facing down.
But in the latest twist in the fraught, years-long debate, Anthony Coulson, general manager at McVitie’s chocolate factory in Stockport, has declared the beloved biscuit should be eaten with the chocolate side facing down.
The astonishing revelation looks set to split generations of fans of the Chocolate Digestive, which was first rolled out in 1925, eight years after the the Stockport factory opened its doors.
‘It’s the world’s most incredible debate, whether you have the chocolate on the top or the chocolate on the bottom,’ the factory boss told BBC Radio Manchester.
Mr Coulson, who said he preferred chocolate-on-top, added: ‘One of the very first things I learnt when I got to join McVitie’s was chocolate side down to eat the digestive.
‘Now up until then I’d always eaten it the other way round.’
But in an apparent bid to pacify thousands of flabbergasted biscuit eaters, he added: ‘You can do it exactly how you want to do it.’
An astonishing 80 million packets of the humble teatime staple are produced every year, with the chocolate made in Greater Manchester.
The genesis of the Chocolate Digestive happened roughly 25 years after the plain biscuit and two years before McVities launched the Jaffa cake.
Despite the biscuits often being referred to as chocolate-topped, McVities has disclosed the plain variety actually go through a ‘chocolate reservoir’ and the chocolate is slavered on its underside.
McVitie’s marketing director Kerry Owens previously said: ‘When we make our McVitie’s chocolate biscuits – whether that be Chocolate Hobnobs, Chocolate Digestives, or even Jaffa Cakes – they go through a reservoir of chocolate on the production line.
‘This essentially “enrobes” the bottom in chocolate – so we can confirm that the chocolate is officially on the bottom of the biscuits.’
In 2021, a study by the University of Oxford sought to settle the controversial debate, finding that people should pick up the biscuits with the chocolate side up, but flip them over before eating them.
Researchers said this technique helped the brain register the chocolate layer and then turning them over before indulging boosts the ‘oral-somatosensory experience’ of the chocolate melting on the tongue.