Cadbury Mini Eggs Vs The Competitors!
Cadbury seem to be using the cheapest, least ethical ingredients, and charging the most for their mini eggs! In some EU countries they aren’t even allowed to call their ware chocolate” as it doesn’t contain enough cocoa solids and yet we are prepared to buy their cheap ingredient offerings at a high price – why?! Well, because they taste so good!
But… Palm oil is a disaster for the environment. While it is an easy crop to maintain, it is not being farmed correctly and is decimating lost of forestry habitat while also being unethical in using child labour. Cadbury are not the only ones using it, it’s in about 50% of the packaged products we buy (a great article about Palm Oil has been produced by the WWF) but when it comes to mini eggs, the competitors are doing better. I taste tested Cadbury Mini Eggs against the dupes from Morrisons, Marks and Spencer, Lidl, Aldi and the Coop with the hopes that one of them would be as good, if not better. None of them are using the dreaded palm oil in their ingredients, all of them are way cheaper, and 3 of them (Aldi, Lidl and Morrisons) are Rainforest Alliance Certified. So much better, on paper, than Cadbury. But… That taste, can any of them match up?!
Vital stats and who’s who:
Cadbury Mini Eggs come in at a whopping £2.68 per 100g and contain palm oil, they are full of the stuff! Cadbury make no apologies either and despite using cheap ingredients across the board they sit comfortably in the knowledge that people still buy their product but… Can someone else do better?
Lidl, Aldi and Morrisons, above, come in at £2.28, £1.34 and £1.25 per 100g respectively. They are ALL Rainforest Alliance Certified and do not contain any palm oil.
Marks and Spencer’s offering looks nothing like the Cadbury version but it is cheaper at £1.94 per 100g (despite being notoriously expensive for chocolate) and it does not contain any palm oil!
The Coop come in at £1.62 per 100g and again, they don’t contain palm oil!
Aesthetics:
They are all, with the exception of M&S who sit firmly in their own lane, making an attempt to look the part, with Aldi and Lidl doing the best in terms of colours – though I’d say they look more like Cadbury Mini Eggs used to look, the Cadbury aesthetic seems to have muted itself a little in recent years! The Coop colours look almost radioactive, and though they are the right size and shape, this lets them down!
Taste:
Unfortunately, that Cadbury flavour really did stand out. We all knew which one Cadbury was. And while I liked the M&S ones best actually, no one else did. Everyone liked Cadbury so they came out on top with M&S second and Aldi, Lidl and Morrisons being the ones my family thought tasted like cheap chocolate… The Coop ones were actually not very nice or palatable at all. What a shame!
Come on Cadbury, do better please! The taste is there but the cocoa solids could be better, the price point is just company greed and that unethical palm oil needs to go!
Check out our Instagram video of the whole process!