Is KitKat a chocolate or a biscuit ?

It’s a chocolate coated wafer biscuit.

Will courts have to get culinary consultants? one in all the implications of the new goods and services tax (GST) regime has been an enormous increase in questions on the classification of varied products so as to see the slab relevant to them.

A lot of those questions appear to relate to food, reflecting the complexity of the many food products and therefore the proven fact that they're made with ingredients that may have multiple uses, as food or medicine or cosmetic or maybe for industrial use. As Congress leader Veerappa Moily asked within the debates over GST: “Is KitKat a chocolate or a biscuit? Is oil considered a toiletries or a cooking oil?”

As a plea for more care to be taken in categorisation, this was fair; as an argument for avoiding GST, it was not. Because food has always involved problems with classification. Partly this can be because we use food products in such a big amount of other ways, but partly too it comes right down to a philosophical issue.


The judge who heard the case decided that just the name ‘Jaffa Cake’ was irrelevant, so McVitie’s had to prove that it had been actually a cake and not a biscuit

A product might need an identity in itself, but it also has an identity in how we use it, which use creates the worth on which this sort of tax is enforced. And this process is probably at its most elemental when it involves eating. An fruit tree produces fruit to propagate more apple trees, but after we pick and eat the apple, or sell it to be eaten, or make it into apple pies to sell at a good higher price, we add value and now are taxed on that.

But the matter this raises is seen within the saga of the Jaffa Cake. this is often a snack within the UK, product of a spongy base topped with orange jelly and chocolate coating to carry it beat. it absolutely was introduced by McVitie’s, a British biscuit manufacturer, in 1927, taking its name from the oranges that were famously exported from Jaffa in what's now Israel. 

Jaffa Cakes celebrated the delicious pairing of chocolate and oranges and have become one in all the foremost popular snacks within the UK. So, in 1991 it wasn’t surprising that McVite’s challenged Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) over an issue arising from a change within the excise tax rules. even as GST is doing now, VAT charged little or nothing on necessities, but a high rate on luxuries.



In a motivating reflection on British priorities, cakes were considered a necessity, but chocolate-covered biscuits a luxury. HMRC said they were the latter and demanded their dues. McVitie’s said they were the previous and visited court to avoid paying the tax. HMRC discovered that Jaffa Cakes appeared like biscuits, were stocked in shops alongside biscuits and were eaten like biscuits.

The judge who heard the case decided that just the name ‘Jaffa Cake’ was irrelevant so McVitie’s had to prove that it had been actually a cake and not a biscuit. to assist this they'd a large Jaffa Cake made as an actual cake, but the important clincher came from simply leaving the products unpacked for some days. Jaffa Cakes got staler and harder, but biscuits got soft. The judge accepted the argument that going stale, but not soft, was the sign of a cake not a biscuit, and McVitie’s won.

The case became famous, quite possibly because tax accountants realised that Jaffa Cakes were a more attractive advertisement for his or her skills, instead of the standard rules and regulations. It led to further challenges, as an example from Marks & Spencer over an analogous teacake (M&S won).

A more audacious challenge came from Procter & Gamble (P&G). Their Pringles chips weren’t made up of thinly sliced potatoes, but from a potato and flour dough extruded into cylinders and cut and fried into perfect round chips. P&G argued that the flour meant that the chips was actually a sort of cake. The judge didn’t buy this reasoning – chips are chips and cakes are cakes, and P&G lost.

Such attempts at creative categorisation return centuries. From early, the older Christian churches decreed days of fasting to recollect the sacrifice made by prophet. The fasts became days of abstinence from meat, which was understood to come back from warm-blooded animals. Fish, being cold-blooded, wasn't considered meat, an attitude that also causes problems for Indian vegetarians while eating in Europe.

(Cold-blooded reptiles were also allowed, but few people wanted to eat them.) within the 17th century, a bishop of Quebec made a motivating extension to the current idea. Canada had many beavers, which swam in water like fish, in order that they could now be counted as fish, and hence eaten on fast days. South American clergymen made an identical dispensation for capybaras, another reasonably semi-aquatic rodent.

Perhaps the foremost startling interpretation came with laurices, the foetuses of rabbits. When harvested before actual birth, they were seen as still ‘swimming’ in humour, and hence were considered a sort of fish. an analogous reasonably convenient characterisation was seen in Indian havelis, where strict rules of vegetarian purity were got around by eggs being recorded within the account books as ‘white potatoes’ and chicken as ‘moving vegetables’.