Which Easter Eggs Have the Most Packaging?

Around 80 million Easter eggs are bought in the UK every year, but have you ever wondered which products are all packaging and no chocolate?

Plastic waste experts at BusinessWaste.co.uk have analysed ten popular high street Easter eggs to uncover those that are all style and no substance.

Ten Easter eggs were analysed from these manufacturers and brands: Ferrero, Moo Free, Marks and Spencer, Mars, Reese’s, Aldi, Thorntons, Nestlé, Cadbury and Terry’s.

Researchers compared several factors, including the:

• Price
• Packaging (if it’s made from recycled materials)
• Content and number of different materials used (plastic, cardboard, foil, film, paper)
• Total weight of the packaging materials
• Weight of the actual chocolate products
• Recycling instructions (if available)
• Percentage of the product that is packaging
• Percent of the packaging material that could be recycled at home

Terry’s Chocolate Orange Egg took the top spot with only 17.7% packaging. The Easter egg, which comes complete with a full Terry’s chocolate orange, alongside the egg itself, is priced at around £5.50. The product also ranked as the most sustainable overall due to its use of just two materials – foil and cardboard. The Easter egg also provides clear instructions for how to recycle the packaging and the packaging uses no plastic at all.

At the other end of the scale, in last place was the Moo Free Moo Freesas Choccy Egg with a whopping 38% packaging. The product is the only vegan item on the list and costs around £6.95. 42% of the packaging was made of plastic, but the brand does provide a QR code to explain why it uses these materials, explaining that cardboard can affect the taste. It’s also worth noting the plastic used is already recycled.

1. We looked to analyse 10 easter eggs, each of which can be easily bought in supermarkets and high street stores. We looked to select items between 100 – 200g in weight, each of which could be classed as a ‘medium-sized egg’. We selected eggs across a range of manufacturers. The price was noted for each.
2. We checked the packaging to discover what materials each was made of, and what can be recycled at home. A percentage was given for the amount of material that could be recycled.
3. We weighed each packaging material separately to understand how much was used. We then combined this to get a total packaging weight per egg.
4. We weighed the egg and any accompanying chocolates without packaging to understand the weight of the actual product.
5. We calculated the total weight of both packaging and the edible components and then worked out what percentage of each product was the packaging.
6. We checked each package to note if recycling instructions were given. Any other important points we also noted.
7. A separate table was created ranking value for money based off the packaging percentage. Those with a lower packaging percentage ranked higher.
8. We ranked each product by how sustainable the packaging is. Each product is given a weighted score that takes into account different factors such as the percentage of recyclable packaging, the number of materials used, and whether the packaging is made from recycled materials. The weighted score is calculated using a percent rank methodology, which standardises the values of each metric relative to the rest of the dataset. This ensures that each product is ranked in comparison to all others.