In the first big biscuit news of 2005 McVities have rolled out rebranded livery over their core range of biscuits including the Digestive, HobNob and Rich Tea. Plans for the rebrand also include bringing Gingernuts and for the first time the Fruit Shortcake into the inner circle of core McVitie's products. This is terrific news for the fruit shortcake which has done such great work over the years without getting the recognition it deserves.

The McV branding introduced in 2002 was a halfway house of large McV logo inset with McVitie's. Perhaps McV was too close to McD and the obvious brand connotations that come with it. Maybe it was due to the fact that we all still continued to refer to them as McVitie's. This move also appears to tie in with the TV campaign of 2004 that simply promoted the McVitie's brand through shots of people flicking biscuits crumbs at each other.

The whole area of Digestive biscuits will also have some interesting developments in 2005. McVities have produced a 25% fat reduced Digestive, called Light Digestives, along side their conventional ones which weighs in with a calorie count of 66 per biscuit. My very rough calculations mean that you can eat six of the fat reduced ones for the same calorie count as five of the others. Have I missed the point?

Chocolate Caramels will be repositioned as McVitie's Chocolate Digestive Caramels to firmly hitch them to hugely successful McVitie's Chocolate Digestive. Finally McVities are set to introduce a Chocolate Orange Digestive in February we've got our hands on some of the first packs find out what we thought of them.