My lad has a nut allergy. That’s not a problem in itself, especially as he takes it seriously himself, always asking people, when he’s eating food other people have prepared, if something has nuts in.
It takes you back a little at first when you’re told, or it did me at least, but then you settle into things. You remember to take his epipens with you about the place. You look at ingredients of anything new you pick up shopping, you ask in restaurants or, you make a packed lunch, just in case.
Now and again though, you slip up. You’re in a hurry and forget the epipens. You pick up a packet of food and forget to check the ingredients, or as happened tonight, don’t think you need to.
Because my lad has a nut allergy, we have chocolate spread that doesn’t have nuts in the ingredients. We have Tesco’s chocolate spread. This one…
These are the ingredients:
It looks like Tesco, along with Cadbury’s, have found the secret of making chocolate spread without using hazlenuts.
So why the buggery, would they do this to their orange chocolate spread?…
They both have virtually the same ingredients, except the orange flavoured one has orange flavouring… and hazlenuts. Since when have hazlenuts tasted of orange? What purpose do they serve?
What irks me, is that the labelling is the same on both jars, apart from the colour. There is no indication to someone used to buying the plain spread that the orange one would have anything other than orange flavouring added. I must add that it probably irks me as a reaction to my slip up of only checking the ingredients at the last minute before opening the jar rather than on the shelf before purchase.
But why should the label be any different? It is from the same range of products, so the labelling would be the same. But why should it have bloody hazlenuts in it? As far as I can tell the only thing Tesco have done by adding hazlenuts to chocolate spread that doesn’t have nuts in, is to keep a little lads’ packed lunch from being a little more exciting.
Update 17/12/12:
I tweeted this post at Tesco. They responded…
@therealsim_o I’ve just checked and the recipe has already been changed to a nut-free recipe and should be hitting the shelves soon :)
— Tesco Customer Care (@UKTesco) December 17, 2012
My lad will be happy.
Update 27/01/2013
Well, what the fuck happened there, then? A nut free recipe was supposed to be being introduced for the Orange flavoured chocolate spread, but instead, look…
Nuts where there wasn’t any previously. When Tesco tweeted that a new recipe was about to be rolled out, I thought they meant they’d be taking nuts *out* of the their orange flavoured chocolate spread, not putting hazel nuts *into* it’s ordinary chocolate spread.
But why? What has prompted this change of recipe? Have there been a sudden flurry of complaints about it not being nutty enough? After years of not having nuts in it, is it suddenly not good enough?
Very disappointed, Tesco. Very disappointed.
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