Every Mr Kipling cake sold in the UK broken down per cake and per pack, checked against NHS daily free sugar limits from age 4 to adult.
Mr Kipling, owned by Premier Foods, is the UK's biggest ambient cake brand. The range covers slices, bakewells, fancies, tarts and seasonal lines, almost all sold in multipacks of six or eight.
The brand talks about calories more than most, and the figures hold up. A French Fancy is 107 calories. The snack pack slices are under 150. Those are small numbers for a cake, and the individual wrapping genuinely does make it easier to stop at one.
Calories are not the number that tells you most about these products.
UK labels list ingredients by weight, heaviest first. On Mr Kipling Angel Slices, the first ingredient is sugar. Not flour, not fat. Sugar, ahead of everything else in the cake.
On French Fancies, the first ingredient is icing sugar and the second is sugar. Wheat flour comes fourth, after water.
The Bakewell range is built differently, with wheat flour first and sugar second, followed by palm and rapeseed oil, and a jam layer where the first ingredient is glucose-fructose syrup. Sugar appears in four separate forms across that one product.
None of this is hidden. It is on the pack, in order, and it tells you more in five seconds than a calorie count does.
A French Fancy weighs around 19g. Something that small cannot carry many calories no matter what it is made of. What the low total conceals is density: for its size, the proportion of that 19g that is sugar is very high.
This is why a per-cake calorie figure and a percentage of a child's daily free sugar limit tell opposite stories about the same product. For a child aged 4 to 6, whose free sugar limit is 19g a day, the second figure is the one that matters.
Premier Foods sells a Delicious & Light range with reduced sugar and slices at 100 calories or under. It is a real reduction rather than a repackaging. It is still cake, and it is still worth checking the sugar figure rather than the calorie one.
Browse every Mr Kipling cake
Each product page includes a full nutrition breakdown per cake and per pack, age-adjusted NHS free sugar and saturated fat calculations from age 4 to adult, an interactive calculator for how many you are actually having, and a plain guide to reading the ingredient list.
