Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband are no longer chocolate following cost-saving reformulations by Nestlé, The Grocer can reveal.
In the UK, confectionery can only lawfully be described as milk chocolate if it contains a minimum of 20% cocoa solids and 20% milk solids.
However, the recipes for Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband have been tweaked by Nestlé to include less cocoa mass and a higher proportion of vegetable fats.
Therefore, over recent weeks, the product descriptions for both products have been updated to refer to a “chocolate flavour coating” rather than “milk chocolate”.
When approached by The Grocer, a spokeswoman for Nestlé confirmed the manufacturer had “recently updated the recipes for our Toffee Crisp range and Blue Riband”, citing soaring cocoa costs as its reason for doing so.
“We’d like to assure shoppers that these changes have been carefully developed and sensory tested with taste and quality remaining a top priority,” she said.
“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.”
While Nestlé continued “to be more efficient and absorb increasing costs where possible”, it was “sometimes necessary to adjust the recipes of some of our products”, the spokeswoman added.
Changes to Kit Kat
It comes after Nestlé changed the packaging for Kit Kat Chunky White at the start of 2025, swapping out “white chocolate” for “white” on the front of pack.
The move was necessary as the product no longer contained the 20% cocoa butter required to be lawfully described as white chocolate.
In June, Nestlé replaced its multipacks of nine Kit Kats for eight-packs, and its multipacks of 21 Kit Kats with 18-packs, citing “significant increases in the cost of cocoa”.
Indeed, last year saw a 200% surge in global cocoa prices. They hit a record $12k per tonne in January 2025 after heavy rainfall and drought hit successive crops in Ghana and Ivory Coast, according to the World Bank.
McVitie’s tweaks
Nestlé isn’t the only manufacturer to have reformulated its chocolate treats to mitigate the impact of soaring cocoa costs.
As reported by The Grocer, Pladis removed cocoa butter from McVitie’s White Chocolate Digestives, renaming them “White Digestives” in March.
It also reduced the amount of cocoa mass in McVitie’s Penguin and Club biscuits to the extent they could no longer be called chocolate. Like Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband, their back-of-packs now refer to “a chocolate flavour coating”.
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