We Flipped the Label on Three "Clean" Cookies Sold in London

We do this a lot at MOLTO, our whole-food dessert kitchen based in Nine Elms, London. Before we ever bake anything, we flip the pack over and read the ingredients out loud. No commentary, just the list. It's the fastest way to know whether a "clean" or "healthier" cookie actually is one. So we did it properly, with the cookies currently sitting on UK shelves marketed as the better option.

Doughlicious, one of the most visible names in the space, lists xanthan gum and rapeseed oil in its cookie dough. Xanthan gum is a thickener, useful for keeping mass-produced dough stable on a shelf, but it's not something you'd ever put in a cookie at home, and it's exactly the kind of ingredient that stops a label-reader mid-scan. Rapeseed oil is a refined industrial seed oil, cheap to produce, heavily processed, and a long way from "whole food" by any definition that means something.

A popular gluten-free soft-baked chocolate chip cookie we checked lists glycerol (a humectant, not a food) and rapeseed oil alongside its oat flour. Its salted caramel version goes further: glucose syrup appears twice under two different ingredient declarations, and palm oil shows up three times across the caramel pieces and the caramel sauce — once as palm oil, once inside a "barrier coating," once inside a natural flavour blend. Seven or more ingredients on that one pack fail a basic whole-food test, on a cookie sold as an indulgent treat with the lowest calorie count of the three.

None of this is a conspiracy. It's what happens when a product needs a long shelf life, a low cost, and a marketing story that says "clean." Something has to give, and it's usually the ingredient list.

Here's what's in a MOLTO cookie: dark chocolate, dates, oats, almonds, butter, cassava flour, rice flour, milk, honey, egg yolk, chia seeds, miso paste, vanilla extract, sea salt, bicarbonate of soda. Fourteen ingredients, all of them things you'd recognise in a kitchen, none of them there to extend shelf life or hide a cheaper oil.

We're not saying this to be smug about it. We're saying it because we did the exact same label check on our own product before we'd let ourselves sell it, and we want you to be able to do the same thing with anyone else's.

Try the cookie that passed its own audit.