The Chocolate Bar Scandal: What Food Brands Aren’t Telling You

0:00Welcome to Catching Up With The Royals, a brand new show with me Richard Coles. And me, Emily Andrews. Every week we'll be going beyond the headlines, lifting the lid, and what life is really like behind the palace walls. Hello, sir. Good morning. I'm The Sun's new royal correspondent. Oh, he said, look at me up and down. Things are looking up. We'll be diving into the moments everyone's talking about. What does the world owe you if all of a sudden you've handed back your crown? Meghan and Harry can't keep hold of their staff. We'll reveal the secrets of an organisation usually shrouded in mystery and explore defining moments of royal history to see how the past still shapes the monarchy today.

0:38Now, you actually knew Princess Diana. I think one of the ways she acquired power was through that relationship with the present. But before that interview, no-one had really spoken and been so open. Was that a game-changer? So, join us every week wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube and on Saturdays on 5 as we catch up with the royals.

1:02Welcome to this week's episode of the Unprocessed Truth, where we're going to talk about the food system. And is it actually devolving rather than evolving? We live in a world where our tech is racing ahead. We have AI in our pockets. We have rockets that are going into space and landing themselves. Yet when you take a look at the food aisle, it can feel like we're heading the other way. Case in point, the recent controversy over the UK lunchbox icons Penguin and Club Bars. Now, if you remember the song, If you like a lot of chocolate in your biscuit, then join the club. Well, the truth is Club cannot use that theme song anymore because they've legally taken chocolate out of their club bars and it's now a chocolate flavour coating rather than real chocolate.

1:54Sad times, I know. But after cacao costs exploded in the last year, basically they can't afford to. Otherwise, they have to put up their prices, which consumers they think don't want. So essentially, they've dropped the cacao content below the UK legal limit for calling it chocolate, which is a big symbolic shift after these brutal harvests in cacao. Now, it's a problem for our health as well because cacao is a superfood and it's very healthy for us. So when you're taking out the cacao, you're putting in more of the fats and these are processed unhealthy fats like palm and shea. And even Kit Kat have done it with their white chocolate Kit Kat bars is now not called white chocolate.

2:38It's white coating Kit Kat bars. It's Penguin, it's Club, it's Kit Kat. These are the worst offenders. and is this a one-off because of bad cacao harvests or is this a race to the bottom to make food more affordable and the food system is actually devolving for our health? I'm Siddharth Van Kampen, the founder of Tonic Health and today I want you to hold two ideas in your mind at once because there's real degradation pressure in parts of the food system. Ingredients are quietly being swapped out, pack sizes are being shrunk and quality is being nudged down to defend price points. But at the same time, there's also genuine progress where in the bread aisle we see sourdough everywhere and we're seeing brands use cleaner and more transparent messaging and ingredients that are better than I can ever remember.

3:34So let's explore both and find out what's actually going on and how we can nudge the food system in the right way to stop it devolving. So let's start with the inputs, right? Costs are rising across the board, but cacao specifically in Ghana and the Ivory Coast had really bad weather hit harvests, which meant a lot of food manufacturers or chocolate manufacturers are really, really struggling because they either had to jack up prices, shrink packs or totally change their recipes and most of the small brands will have sucked up costs as well to remain competitive so a lot of them will have swung to losses.

4:14So what are we going to do? Well these manufacturers who have taken chocolate out of their bar and now have a flavor coating say that taste tests say there's no difference but from a quality standpoint for your health that's a major step down because you're taking out the nutritious cacao part and leaving in the not so healthy part. Then there's shrinkflation. Now we've all been exposed to this over the last few years with your Christmas chocolates and your boxes of quality street getting smaller, but it's happening everywhere. Greek yogurt used to come in one kilo tubs. It now comes in a 900 gram tub.

4:52It's frustrating, I know. So what can we do about it? Well, polls show that most of us notice it and we don't like it, but not enough of us have actually changed our shopping behavior, which means more and more manufacturers will continue to lean into shrinkflation because ultimately it's a marketplace and they will do what the data tells them. So it's those magic shelf prices of one pound, two pounds that all the manufacturers are looking for. They are driving our behavior in the supermarket. And that's why the manufacturers will protect the price point whilst shrinking the grammage to save their margin and make sure they can afford to make those products at those prices.

5:39This isn't new, it's happened for decades, but unfortunately over the last five years with cost of living, this has continued to be happening at such a pace that it's become very visible for most of us. So is this actually bad for society? Well, on one hand, it protects affordability. So not a problem, you know, whether it's 200 grams or 180 grams, what's really the difference? But over time, what happens is we end up paying more per gram for lower quality formulations and products. Whilst thinking it's all the price is the same, actually we're having to spend a lot more to get the same level of nutrition.

6:20And most importantly, it undermines actually the nutrition we are getting in our products because they often swap away nutrient dense real ingredients for cheaper fillers. Look back in history, how much do we actually spend on food today versus a decade ago? Well, data shows that the share of household spend on food fell dramatically over the late 20th century. And we are now far below the 1970s when food and drink took up more than a quarter of the family household budget. So we're getting cheaper calories, which have been in theory a success story of the food industry, making food more accessible and more affordable for everyone.

7:06But unfortunately, this has driven cheap ultra processed calories that have a huge health cost that we're now paying for with 63 % of the UK overweight or obese and diet related illness being the leading causes of unnecessary death worldwide. So on one hand, yes, we've made things more accessible. But on the other hand there's a huge health cost that we are all having to pay whether that be through increased taxes because the NHS can't afford to keep up with the cost of managing all these diet related diseases. Even if you're healthy and fit we are ending up having to pay for indirectly. So there is a bit of a race to the bottom going on in the food industry which is causing these kind of cheap and cheerful products to be very bad for our health.

7:56And we've got to do something about it. And we can, this is the positive part. There is evolution and we can ourselves collectively together as a community drive that evolution further forward because an encouraging shift is that sourdough is now a mainstream thing in supermarkets, which wasn't the case five years ago. And it's everywhere and it's affordable for most. It's two pounds a loaf. And that's happened because we have voted with our wallet. Sourdough is not a niche anymore. It's an everyday staple and it's healthy because it doesn't have all the additives. It's only got four or five ingredients and it's fermented.

8:38So it's got better digestibility. So that's where food evolution can drive better products onto our shelves and into our cupboards and be better for our health at the same time. So we just need to vote with our wallets because as consumers, we all jumped on the sourdough trend. We all started buying it and therefore manufacturers made more of it and found ways to make it affordable and cheaper for everyone. Because these green shoots of evolution in the food industry drive cleaner labels, which are better for our health. They reduce sugar, they cut out the synthetic or chemical additives, and we build a better supply chain or food chain for us all.

9:23These things become mainstream. The more we buy organic foods, the more organic foods you're going to see on the shelf. It's really that simple. So let's give some credit. There is change happening in the industry. It is helping us evolve the food system in a better way. But at the same time, we need to make sure we continue to buy more of the things we want to see. Because if we don't, what happens is technology and evolution in the food industry tends to optimize for margin, and that's manufacturer margin over nutrition and your health. So we need to correct this model and put nutrition at the center of the food system and make ourselves evolve products and our food system to drive more nutrition into the food system so we can all be healthier.

10:17So the question really comes down to what do we buy on a weekly basis? What do we reward? What food manufacturers do we reward? And what behavior do we reward as society to drive manufacturers to make changes, to drive supermarkets to make healthier changes? Let's see. The Penguin and the club story, is it a one-off? The cacao shocks have been very severe. They haven't happened in many other places in the supermarket. And in theory, it won't last forever. Hopefully next year there will be a better harvest. But what it does do is it creates a precedent that if we keep buying Penguin bars and if we keep buying club bars, these cheaper formulations will be accepted and they will become the standards because the manufacturer will keep making it and making more margin and having a better business essentially for them but not for your health.

11:10So what we need to do as I said is vote with our wallet, make sure we don't buy the brands that are trying to rip us off and take good health out of our supermarket. So what we want is better nutrition, real clear labeling and transparency so that we can have good quality food in our cupboards without being duped by these brands that are putting profit over people. One last thing to consider is are we actually underspending on the quality of food, right? I mentioned how back in the 70s we were spending 25 % of our household income on food and that's much less today. So maybe we should all, maybe skip a pint of beer on the weekend or skip a coffee in the coffee shop or perhaps some avocado on toast on the weekend and we should think about making sure we spend a little bit more on our weekly shop so that we nudge the supermarket into better quality foods, better foods for our health to give us real health without these hidden costs down the line where oh it's fine it's just a penguin now but in 10-20 years time our societal health is in a worse place.

12:27So finally here's how we push for this evolution right we vote with our wallet we have to check the ingredients list we have to read them on the back not just the front of pack because you can't believe what's on there half the time you know we need to compare the prices per 100 grams to neutralize the shrinkflation tricks. You can see that on most shelf edge labels in the supermarket, what the price per kilo is. So check those. And look, when your favorite product downgrades quality or shrinks the pack size, email them, comment on their social media, talk to them and switch your buying behavior and buy another brand that isn't doing that because that would be enough for the manufacturer to actually go back to how they were doing things and they will listen to the consumers.

13:15Ultimately, we can drive the change. So we have to choose the brands that are choosing your health, putting your health first over their profits so that essentially we will reward positive trends and positive behaviors that are reducing sugars, swapping out additives and making the supermarket a healthier place because that is ultimately what will change the industry and change everybody's health for the better. So whilst tech is evolving at a crazy pace with AI, our food can evolve too towards better quality, better transparency and health if we demand it and we reward it. We get involved, as I said, from voting with your wallet, but also getting on social media, emailing the brands and being vocal about this stuff.

14:04And the system will change. It simply is designed to follow your signals, right? all manufacturers look at sales data and that's what drives their strategic decisions so thank you for listening if you found this useful please share it with a friend and spread the word of good health and the unprocessed truth so thank you for listening and thank you for backing your health by listening to this and looking after it and making better choices