Penguins and Clubs can no longer be described as 'chocolate bars' following major change
When is a chocolate bar not a chocolate bar?
Kit Roberts
Penguin and Club bars will no longer be classed as chocolate after changes to the recipe.
The former became known for the surreal TV adverts, including one series featuring a man in a large penguin suit attempting to steal fish from a chip shop or aquarium, before a voiceover urged people to 'pick up a Penguin'.
Each bar also contained a terrible dad joke with the punchline hidden under the wrapper, like: "What do penguins eat? Icebergers." Badum-tshhh.
Now changes to the recipe mean that the long-running sweet treats, along with the Club bars, can no longer be sold as chocolate.
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Instead, they have to be described as 'chocolate flavoured' due to changes in the recipe.
But why has McVitie's made these changes?
A spokesperson for Pladis, which owns McVitie's said: "We made some changes to McVitie's Penguin and Club earlier this year, where we are using a chocolate flavour coating with cocoa mass, rather than a chocolate coating.
"Sensory testing with consumers shows the new coatings deliver the same great taste as the originals."
The choice also means the end for the slogan for Club bars, which went: “If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our Club."
Unfortunately, the decision has come from large scale problems in the supply chain around chocolate, which have led to increases in the price of cocoa.
This has led Pladis to decrease the amount of cocoa and add in larger quantities of palm oil and shea oil into the coating around the biscuits.
In the UK, regulations mean that milk chocolate should have at least 20 percent cocoa solids, lower than the EU standard of 25 percent, in order to be legally classified as chocolate.
If it is less than that proportion when it should be sold as chocolate flavoured instead.
The UK primarily sources cocoa from producers in West Africa, including countries such as Ghana and Ivory Coast.
However, a series of severe droughts has resulted in poor harvests of cocoa, leading to an increase in the price of the ingredient.
Farmers in Ivory Coast report dire conditions, warning that without fairer markets and financial support cocoa bean yield could be destroyed completely by 2030.
It's not the first time that a UK confectionary has had to be downgraded to 'chocolate flavoured', with products like McVitie's White Digestives and KitKat White no longer being marketed as 'white chocolate' in 2025 due to not meeting the minimum cocoa butter requirements.