Wendyl wants to know: Iconic treat mash-up is a tingling leap of faith

Whittaker's L&P White Chocolate, $1.55 for 50g

Each week, Wendyl Nissen takes a packaged food item and decodes what the label tells you about its contents

This bar falls under the "everybody's talking about it" category as it was launched last week with a television ad involving a Whittaker's van crashing into the Paeroa L&P bottle.

Several people have asked me to take a look at it. Some of them have been rather unkind about the taste, others were concerned about the "poppy" bits which fizz in your mouth.

On the surface this seems like a heart-warming melding of two iconic Kiwi brands, but what is going on in the packet?

Ingredients (in order of greatest quantity first):

• White chocolate (sugar, milk powder (30%), cocoa butter (28%), emulsifier (soy lecithin), vanilla flavour.) - These are all standard ingredients for chocolate with the milk powder helping out to make it white. The vanilla flavour is probably artificial as there is no mention of natural flavouring.

The total sugar content of this bar (including the popping candy below) is 28.8g per 50g serve which is 6.8 teaspoons and 56.6% of the total bar.

• Popping candy 6% (sugar, lactose, glucose, cocoa butter, carbon dioxide (290), powdered sugar. - Obviously the popping candy is in here to simulate the bubbles in the L&P soft drink. Some people worry that the popping sensation comes from some nasty chemical reaction with saliva but it is just trapped carbon dioxide. The candies are made by mixing the ingredients (above) into a syrup which is then exposed to pressurised carbon dioxide, causing tiny bubbles to be trapped inside the candy. When it comes into contact with saliva in the mouth the candy dissolves and releases the carbon dioxide which pops and leaves a tingling sensation.

• L&P flavour - The original L&P flavour came from a mixture of lemon with the mineral waters of Paeroa which was first bottled by the Paeroa Natural Mineral Water Company in 1910. These days it is manufactured by Coca-Cola Amatil. There is no mention of natural flavour here or what flavourings are used.

My recommendations

I'm a big fan of the Whittaker's Peanut Slab. You just can't go wrong with one of those in your day. So to see this new take on the old slab is clever marketing, taking two iconic brands and mashing them together, but it's quite a leap of faith in the taste department. The white chocolate definitely tastes of L&P but failed to impress my family who gathered around for a sample. Some were put off by the fizzy popping candy and others felt the texture owed a lot to soap.

If you want to try something different then go ahead, there is nothing much in here to worry about except the fact that we don't know what is in the L&P flavour component.

You'll be ingesting a big hit of sugar per bar so you wouldn't be wanting to eat too many of them in a day.

Highlights

• High in sugar at 6.8 teaspoons per
50g bar.

• Not sure what is in L&P flavouring.

• Popping candy just trapped carbon
dioxide.

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