We’ve been eating chocolate digestives wrong, says McVitie’s biscuit factory boss

People have been eating chocolate digestives incorrectly since they were first created 100 years ago, a biscuit factory boss has suggested.

Anthony Coulson is general manager at McVitie’s chocolate refinery and bakery in Stockport, which opened in 1917, and has produced chocolate digestives ever since they were invented eight years later.

But despite more than 70 million packs being sold every year, according to McVitie’s, Mr Coulson believes that fans of the famed biscuit – including himself – have been eating them incorrectly for a century.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Coulson said the biscuit was originally supposed to be eaten with the chocolate side facing down.

“It’s the world's most incredible debate, whether you have the chocolate on the top or the chocolate on the bottom,” said Mr Coulson, who said he personally ate digestives with the chocolate on top.

McVities, which first began as a small shop on Edinburgh’s Rose Street in 1839, first developed the recipe for its digestive biscuits in 1892 – nearly a decade before the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. Its recipe is credited to an employee named Alexander Grant.

Named in reference to the belief that the inclusion of baking powder could aid digestion – as touted in an 1851 issue of The Lancet medical journal – the chocolate variety of the popular biscuit was then introduced by McVitie’s more than a quarter of a century later, two years before the creation of jaffa cakes in 1927.

It is not the first time that McVitie’s has sought to flip the narrative around the method in which its prize product is consumed.

In 2014, an email purportedly sent by a United Biscuits spokesperson, which was then circulated on social media, said: “For your information ... the biscuits go through a reservoir of chocolate which enrobes them so the chocolate is actually on the bottom of the biscuits and not on the top.”

Contacted by The Independent at the time of this assertion, a McVitie’s spokesperson was quoted as saying: “The McVitie’s stamp is on the other side, which is the top of the biscuit.”

As they mark the biscuit’s 100th year, employees at the factory in Stockport were reported to have expressed their belief in the biscuit’s enduring popularity.

Lynn Loftus, who has worked there for 36 years, described the biscuit as “timeless”, while Alix Knagg, who has spent six months at the factory, said the chocolate digestive was “still a great product 100 years on”.