Good Housekeeping award our Dark Chocolate Ocean Egg 'Best Plastic-Free Egg'
Co-founder Claire here with my thoughts of this latest endorsement from Good Housekeeping. As you may know, every year, Good Housekeeping conduct a 'Tried & Tested' taste test of Easter Eggs, from the mass produced through to the artisan, and allocate them points and categories. Over the years, we have entered various eggs which have always done very well as they have enjoyed our crunchy Honeycombe Eggs, studded inside with big chunks of our honeycombe, or the Dinosaur Egg with its surprise of finding mini dinosaurs and ammonites studded inside.
This year we sent them our Dark Chocolate Ocean Egg to assess. This egg is studded with starfish & turtles inside, is naturally vegan-friendly and comes with some extra special elements - it (along with its milk chocolate partner), is supporting the SeaLife Trust, a marine conservation charity based here in Dorset, with 50p from the sale of each egg going to the trust AND it is presented in 100% plastic-free packaging (as our all our eggs this year).
We have put all our eggs into recyclable cardboard kraft boxes so you can't now see the eggs but we think that is the right thing to do! Our previous boxes had a plastic front which, whilst it was made of 70% recycled materials, was still plastic and we wanted to do better than that and remove the plastic altogether. Now, rather than being anchored in place by fiddly cardboard 'shelves', each egg is nestled inside the box wrapped in recyclable food safe tissue, so it will travel safely and unwrapping it will be part of the experience!
Anyway, back to Good Housekeeping...well it turns out that they highly approve of our efforts with regards to not only the taste & decoration of our eggs but also our packaging as they awarded this egg, 'Best Plastic'Free Egg' - we'll take that! They did seem to miss that this Dark Chocolate Ocean egg is supporting the SeaLife Trust but you will see that if you look at this egg's web page.
This is what they had to say about our Dark Chocolate Ocean Egg: "Dedicated dark chocolate fans will adore this luxurious egg. The shell has been painted with an impressive blue ocean design and inside you’ll find it’s studded with secret chocolate turtles and starfish. It tasted great too, with a vanilla flecked, rich, dark cocoa flavour. And for extra brownie points, this year’s packaging is completely plastic-free."
One last thing though that I have to get off my chest about this Good Housekeeping Tried & Tested Taste Test. Whilst we have huge respect for the organisation that is Good Housekeeping and its work over the years to educate, inform and help consumers make good decisions with regards to the food they eat, we have to say that we were saddened to see them award the best Easter egg accolade to a Cadbury's dairy milk egg studded with mini eggs (we wonder where they got the idea to stud treats inside their eggs from?). We wonder about their taste criteria as, whilst we agree that people (but not everyone!) 'has a soft spot' for Cadbury's & their mini eggs, in our opinion, there is nothing good about Cadbury's milk chocolate other than its nostalgia value.
Not only does it contain very little cocoa, and therefore a large % of sugar (which makes it super sweet which isn't great from either a taste or a health point of view), it also contains palm oil, which has no place in chocolate! Any chocolate that contains palm oil also contains a lot of sugar as they are cutting costs - palm oil is cheap & sugar is cheap whereas cocoa is expensive, especially the cocoa butter element of cocoa. Multinational industrial chocolate companies are replacing some of the costly cocoa butter with cheap palm oil & other vegetable fats - NO! This is both adulterating the chocolate and contributing to the unecessary destruction of rainforests and the habitats of endangered species such as orangutans. If you would like to find out more about this issue, have a read of this blog about our partnership with the Sumatran Orangutan Society.
So if you are considering buying a mass produced egg from a supermarket, please turn over the Easter Egg box packaging to read the ingredients section on the back or base of the box - palm oil has to be declared so it is easy to spot it and there will also be a statement that says "Contains vegetable fats in addition to cocoa butter" - that is your signal to put it back on the shelf and look for a chocolate egg made with pure cocoa butter!
Click here to view the full Good Housekeeping 2021 Easter Egg Taste Test