A Jaffa Cake is a disc about two and a half inches across: a thin layer of light sponge, a firm circle of orange-flavoured jelly on top, and the whole thing covered in dark chocolate. They are sold in the biscuit aisle, eaten like biscuits, and are legally cakes.
The court case
This is the most enjoyable piece of tax law in Britain, and every British adult knows roughly how it went.
Under UK VAT law, most food is zero-rated — no tax. But confectionery is standard-rated, and the legislation specifically includes “biscuits wholly or partly covered in chocolate” as taxable, while leaving cakes zero-rated even when chocolate-covered.
So a chocolate biscuit is taxed and a chocolate cake is not. In 1991, Customs and Excise decided the Jaffa Cake was a biscuit and demanded VAT. McVitie’s took it to a tribunal.
How they won
Their arguments were:
- The mixture is a sponge batter, closer in composition to a Swiss roll than to biscuit dough.
- They are sold and packaged alongside cakes in some contexts.
- The decisive point: a cake goes hard when it goes stale; a biscuit goes soft. A Jaffa Cake, left out, goes hard.
They also baked an enormous twelve-inch Jaffa Cake and brought it in, to demonstrate that at cake scale nobody would hesitate to call it one. The tribunal found for McVitie’s, and Jaffa Cakes have been zero-rated ever since.
The case is still taught in British law courses as an illustration of how statutory categories fail at the edges, and it is cited whenever a similar dispute arises — as it did with Pringles, which argued at length that they were not really crisps and lost.
Nobody believes it
The legal position has made no difference to ordinary usage whatsoever. They are kept in the biscuit tin, offered with tea, and eaten in threes. Asking a British person whether a Jaffa Cake is a cake or a biscuit remains a reliable way to start a fifteen-minute conversation.
How to eat one
There is a widely observed ritual, popularised by a 1990s advertising campaign: the full moon, the half moon, the total eclipse. You bite around the edge to leave a full circle of jelly, then a half, then eat the rest.
A rival method involves nibbling the sponge off the bottom first and eating the chocolate and jelly disc separately, which is regarded by most people as psychopathic.
The name
From the Jaffa orange, a variety grown around the city of Jaffa in what is now Israel, which was widely imported into Britain in the 1920s when the biscuit — cake — was introduced.
The variations
McVitie’s produce lemon and lime, blackcurrant, and passionfruit versions, plus a “Jaffa Cake Bar” and a full-sized Jaffa Cake cake, which is a cake made to taste like a Jaffa Cake, which is legally also a cake. This has not simplified matters.