John Lennon and Taking the Biscuit

I’ve always been mildly obsessed with trivia, and was interested to discover that John Lennon, instead of being paid in real money, once famously requested payment for a TV appearance in Chocolate Bath Olivers, my favourite biscuit.

This got me thinking as I sit here wolfing down a Kit Kat, at a mere 107 calories, that it is not without some amusement that I heard this week of reports of a boom in the UK biscuit business. I can also confirm that officially, according to makers Nestlé, Kit Kats are chocolate ‘biscuit’ bars.

I’m also cheered by the fact that it is chocolate coated biscuits, and individually wrapped varieties, that are currently top of the biscuit tree. I’ve never been one for jammy dodgers or custard creams, and the thought of dunking just makes me cringe.

Although I am generally sceptical, according to the recent industry survey, carried out by Mintel, biscuit consumption is way up on previous years, and is set to increase further. Clearly big business.

In my own experience as a marketer, you can pretty much get surveys to show whatever results you want through a combination of who you ask, and how you ask the questions, but no matter.

What did astonish me was that apparently, on average, a UK household consumes as many as 100 packets of biscuits per year. That’s an awful lot of biscuits. Apart from a perennial craving for all things chocolate, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth myself and doubt that I buy as many as 6 packets of biscuits per year. I admit that living alone, and out working most of the time, I don’t have quite the opportunity for consumption that a family of four with ravenous kids coming in from school and champing at the bit might have, but the trend is nonetheless worrying. There have been recent news headlines about the damage that sugar does to our diets, and of course most biscuits are packed with it, and fat.   

One argument is that in a recession more of us reach for a biscuit as a quick cheap comfort fix when everything around us is falling to pieces. Although I never keep biscuits in the house, I know that I certainly reach for one, even though I know I shouldn’t, when dashing from one meeting to the next and a biscuit is all that’s available.

One consolation locally is that Somerset County Council, in an effort to save money, no longer provides biscuits for meetings, but it does continue to provide hot drinks.

Apparently it is the ritual of sitting down with a cup of tea or coffee that tempts over half the nation to reach for the biscuit barrel, to the tune of over £2.2 billion.

It must therefore be the tea and coffee to blame for my expanding waistline; without it there wouldn’t be the same craving for a biscuit.

Time to switch to a low calorie G&T then, or invest in some biscuit company shares?