M&S has sparked online debate with a chocolate bar which claims on the front of pack to have ‘only 5 ingredients’ but names nine in the full ingredients list.
The Dark Chocolate & Coconut Date Bar is among the latest additions to the retailer’s ‘Only… ingredients’ range, which launched in March with a trio of cereals and a pack of bread rolls. Each product in the range purports to contain six ingredients or fewer.
The coconut date snack is among three dark chocolate bars that have been added, each claiming to have five ingredients or fewer.
The dark chocolate is counted as a single ingredient on the front of pack, while the full list also names the ingredients that make up the compound: cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, emulsifier: lecithin (soya), and natural vanilla flavouring.
“Really uncomfortable with this trend,” wrote development chef and writer Anthony Warner on LinkedIn on Friday. “Just five ingredients in this product apparently, although one of those is dark chocolate, which is by its nature a compound ingredient. Using this logic, a Dairy Milk is just one ingredient.”
Warner, a former head development chef for Premier Foods, also questioned the brand positioning of the 50g bar, which is 55.9% sugar and 11.9% saturated fat.
“The whole rhetoric around Just X Ingredients purports to be about health and transparency, yet here’s a product that is 56% sugar and 12% saturated fat,” wrote Warner.
“This is exactly what we warned about when talking about the dangers of UPF categorisation. The system will be gamed and consumers will suffer.”
Warner’s post has drawn a number of comments in agreement. Clinical nutritionist Natalie Louise Burrows said: “What was transparency isn’t so transparent after all.”
Another comment said: “Can’t wait for the one ingredient sugar SKU to drop.”
M&S is understood to see the range as a way of offering customers the choice to buy products containing only ingredients they would find at home in their cupboard and might use to make something themselves. Dark chocolate is seen as one of those things, and in that sense a single ingredient.
The idea of eating only ingredients that might be found at home has been popularised by UPF critics such as journalist and author Michael Pollan, whose “food rules” include “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food”.
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The new M&S range also includes white bread rolls containing “only five ingredients”, with a caveat on the pack that the wheat flour listed is fortified with calcium, iron, vitamin B3 and B1 – a legal requirement for cereals to boost nutritional value.
The hero product of the range is a box of corn flakes with corn as its sole ingredient.
Nutrition app Zoe is attempting to address “scaremongering” in the debate over ultra-processed food by categorising products by risk, from low to high. The company presented its ‘Processed Food Risk Scale’ to the House of Lords last week, and hopes to make it available to consumers.
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