Whether dunking, nibbling or munching a chocolate digestive, it seems common sense to keep the biscuity side down.
But we are getting it all wrong, according to Anthony Coulson, general manager of the McVitie’s factory in Stockport, Greater Manchester.
He insists that the chocolate should be on the bottom and the biscuit on top.
“One of the very first things I learned when I got to join McVitie’s was chocolate side down to eat the digestive,” he told the BBC. “Up until then, I’d always eaten it the other way round.”
The reasoning, he said, is obvious – the tongue gets the chocolate hit straight away. “It starts to melt, starts to get the flavour and away you go. It makes sense, right?”
This year brings the centenary of the chocolate digestive, with the biscuit having been made by McVitie’s since 1925.
They were a follow-up to the plain digestive, first manufactured in 1892 but conceived much earlier by two Scottish doctors who believed the sodium bicarbonate ingredient would aid digestion.
They now regularly come top of Britain’s favourite biscuit lists and were followed in a 2020 poll by shortbread, chocolate fingers, jaffa cakes (not a biscuit) and chocolate hobnobs. Chocolate digestives were also named as the best dunker in 2009.
In his travel book, Notes From a Small Island, the American-British writer Bill Bryson asked: “What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardeners’ Question Time, and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.”
The centenary has led to McVitie’s launching one of its biggest ever marketing campaigns, which includes a pop-up chocolate digestive store in Piccadilly Circus, London, from 2-5 May.
It is not known whether the store will tell people how to eat their biscuits but, even for factory boss Coulson, old habits die hard.
“I still do [eat it chocolate side up] if I’m totally honest,” he admitted.
