Nestlé products made in Britain

You might be surprised just how much of Britain goes into making your favourite Nestlé products.

Whether it’s having a break with a KitKat or enjoying a cup of Nescafé, many of the products you know and love are proudly made here in Britain.

And it’s not just the products themselves. Much of the ingredients, packaging, research and development, know-how and even how we power our factories is uniquely British as well.

KitKat is made in York

We love York and its chocolate-making history. Once nicknamed the Chocolate City, it’s where KitKat was invented and where it is still made today.

Ever wondered where the idea came from? The famous bars were invented in 1935 thanks to an employee suggesting an idea for a chocolate bar that could easily fit in a lunch box. The name originates from an eighteenth-century pastry cook called Christopher Catling, or Kit Cat as he was more commonly known.

90 years later, we make up to four million KitKat bars in York every day, all designed, developed and delivered by our team of chocolate experts.

We have 2,000 people working at our York campus, from manufacturing to research and development, logistics and head office.

We also make Aero, Yorkie and Polo in York too.

VIDEO: Take a trip around our York site with Giles.

Nescafé is made in Derbyshire and Cumbria

280 cups of Nescafé are drunk every second in the UK, and it’s our team of coffee experts who make sure you’ll always have the perfect cup.

Nestlé invented Nescafé in 1938 and we started making it at our Tutbury factory in Derbyshire in the 1950s. Tutbury was one of Nestlé’s first factories in Britain, originally starting out as a milk factory in 1901.

Today, we make 170,000 jars of Nescafé every day. To find out more, go behind the beans with the team here.

In Cumbria, our Nestlé Dalston factory has been making milk based products products since 1962. Dalston was the perfect spot as it’s close to dairy farms which provide the fresh milk for the perfect Nescafé cappuccinos – we make 25 million of them every week!

VIDEO: Learn more about Nescafé with Emilie.

British farmers provide the milk for KitKat and Nescafé

We use fresh milk from local farmers in all our confectionery and Nescafé frothy coffee products made in Britain. We have been working with First Milk, a famer-owned dairy co-operative, since 2003 to source high quality milk from farming families within a 50 mile radius of our factories in Cumbria and Ayrshire.
Learn more

Quality Street is made in Halifax

Our Yorkshire roots aren’t just about KitKat, there’s a Christmas classic here too.

Invented in Halifax in 1936, it was Violet Mackintosh who came up with the game-changing toffees in brightly coloured packaging which became Quality Street as we know it today.

Whole generations have worked at our Halifax factory to bring our famous sweets to the nation, producing Christmas tins from March every year to make sure there are enough ready for the big day. Around 260 sweets whizz through our machines every minute.

We introduced the world’s first ever twist wrapping machine in Halifax to revolutionise the way our sweets were manufactured, and in 2022 we removed almost 2.5 billion pieces of packaging from the supply chain by switching to recyclable paper wrappers.

Our Halifax team also make After Eight here too.