I must admit to having a sweet tooth which I take care of quite often! Today I have chosen some ‘minstrels’ a chocolate based candy snack that is similar in nature to smarties. Minstrels contain the following ingredients:

-Sugar,Cocoa Butter ,Skimmed Milk Powder ,Cocoa Mass ,Lactose ,Vegetable Fat ,Whey Powder ,Milk Fat ,Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithin, E442) ,Dextrin ,Starch ,Glazing Agent (Carnauba Wax) ,Colours (E104, E122, E124, E132) ,Modified Starch ,Vegetable Oil ,Flavourings ,Natural Vanilla Extract ,Milk Chocolate contains Milk Solids 14% minimum ,Milk Chocolate contains Vegetable Fats in addition to Cocoa Butter

The ingredients are written in order of content percentage in the snack. The ingredients that come to my attention are vegetable fat and cocao butter

Vegetable Fat: a fat that is derived from a plant and in this snack it is a trans fat which has numerous health impacts (hard to digest). Vegetable fat is made from seeds of corn, canola, sunflower etc. The method for making vegetable fat is similar to corn-syrup where seeds are pressed into an oil. Commercial production units of these use solvents to accelerate the pressing process. About 100kgs of oil produce around 50 L of oil which is an extremely seed intensive process requiring a lot of seeds from the respective plant.

Cocoa butter: is a derivation of vegetable fat. The butter is made through roasting cocoa beans and separating them from their hulls. The liquor created is pressed to extract the butter from the solids and then deodorized to take away the undesirable strong taste.

The sugar used is not high fructose corn as this is not as common in Europe compared to North America.