Your ViewsKeep your e-mails pouring in, it's good to know that there are lots of you out there with views and opinions. To help you work out what is what, are now little icons to help you see biscuit related themes. And now you can see at a glance which are the most contested subjects via this graph (requires Flash 6.0 plugin). Please keep your mails coming in to nicey@nicecupofteaandasitdown.com | If you like, you can use this search thingy to find stuff that matches with any of the icons you pick, or use the fantastic free text search, Yay! | Your e-Mails |
John Kenny
Digestive Review |
Before I retired from the biscuit industry over 10 years ago Digestives were, for very many years, consistently around 15% of the total branded and own-label sweet and semi-sweet biscuit market - a quite mind boggling proportion. I remember many debates about introducing new Digestive variants but we mostly remained to be convinced they would do any more than fragment the market.
New biscuit products which settle in and survive with a steady market share have always been very few and far between and difficult to formulate. Presumably the up and coming marketing whizzes have recognised this and are now proliferating all these mutations of Digestives arguing that this is what the market needs whilst hoping to justify their existence by increasing sales volumes.
Does anyone know the proportion of the market occupied by the Digestive family now and how successful this strategy has been?
A bald, retired, biscuit basher |
Nicey replies: Hello John,
I'm sure many of the people who drop by the site once in a while would know the answer, however they might not wish to share it. The bewildering proliferation of Digestives in the last 18 months may well throw up a one or two long lasting additions to the family, time will tell.
Still I'm pleased to see some actual biscuit innovation activity around such a major brand to capture our attention, rather than just some marketing push that ropes in some obvious high profile media types. Even the biggest cash cows need the occasional spot of nurturing or else they eventually start to show signs of decline. |
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Bill Brooke
Digestive Review |
A work colleague advised me to eat McVities Digestives with crunchy peanut butter. Has to be McVities has to be Sunpat, but most importantly has to be crunchy peanut butter.
I used to weight 8 stone, but given my regular need of this biscuit fix I'm not any longer. Should I sue, or wire my jaw closed?
Bill |
Nicey replies: Unless you want to be discovered deceased sitting on your kahzie you probably want to moderate your intake, if not try deep frying them in batter.
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Marge
Digestive Review |
Hiya Nicey
Lovin’ your work btw, however on to more pressing things. I was wondering which is the better digestive biccie, the one with choccy or the one without? And should it be milk choccy or plain? I just don’t know. I cannot decide. I have devoured packs of the said digestives in order to find out, but can’t make up my mind. Should I just give up and start nibbling on ginger biccies (which I also love to bits), or continue in my digestive quest for taste truth?
Regards,
Marge |
Nicey replies: Marge,
This probably isn't the advice you're after but the best plan is to not worry about it. |
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Chris Bowen
Digestive Review |
Nicey,
The recent thread on use and abuse of digestive biscuits left me pondering the therapeutic benefits of confession.
Deep breath. Here we go -
A key comfort food during my early-to-mid teenage years was a digestive biscuit topped with a blob of salad cream ... or tomato ketchup ... or both. For both sauces the preferred brand was Heinz - other brands and supermarket own label imitations were never quite the same.
A variant was a sandwich of two biscuits with the selected sauce, or sauce mix, as the "filling". The practicalities of eating such a sandwich restricted the amount of "filling" that could be used but for some reason it never occurred to me to compensate with a "topping".
Knowledge of this predilection left my mother with mental scars that she carries to this day. Rightly or wrongly she never attempted to ban the practice.
I'd more or less kicked the habit by the time I left school but there have been a few relapses down the years. One of these occurred a few years ago when green tomato ketchup became available.
There, I think that I do feel better for that!
Chris Bowen |
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Anne Till
Digestive Review |
Ive been sitting here for the past 2 hours (its about 5 am) in my cold basement somewhere in Canada, surfing the net, really needing a nice cup of tea. Not residing in this country very long and very dubious of what resembles tea over here, last week I ordered a tea with milk from a local Coffee-Time. My husband brought it to me, I sipped it and said "does this tea taste like ****?" - vaguely reminiscent of that famous Austin Powers sketch. My long-suffering hubby duly returned the luke- warm sludge, only to discover that the server had placed the tea-bag into the cup and filled it up with black coffee!
p.s. the only English biscuit I can find in my local store is McVities Digestive (plain) - thank heavens for small mercies. But it doesn't quite taste the same?????
Anne - Toronto |
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