Colin the Caterpillar at 30: An ode to the best British cake on its birthday

On the surface, children’s birthday parties in the 1990s and early 2000s were friendly affairs: chipper party entertainers on hand to impress with their balloon animal-making abilities, endless rounds of Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs, and enough Party Rings to ensure no child slept for the next three days. But, if you looked just under the surface, an undercurrent of competitiveness could be seen as everyone competed for the best bit of Colin the Caterpillar.

Presented on the table topped with birthday candles, it is of course common party etiquette that the birthday child would get the white chocolate face – but that didn’t stop every youngster in attendance secretly hoping the child couldn’t finish it and would share it around.

Three decades later, not much has changed. Offices up and down the country are full (or, at least, were until the coronavirus lockdown) of adults vying for the best bit – a chocolate multicoloured bean or a white chocolate foot in exchange for the embarrassment of communal singing.

That’s the power of Colin. A cake that – on the surface – is remarkably similar to the many hundreds of other chocolate cakes on sale. But anyone who has tried one in its 30 years of existence, regardless of age, just knows; a Colin is a different beast altogether.

Colin the Caterpillar was first launched by Marks & Spencer in 1990, but it was far from the signature cake that we cherish today. The first iteration made Colin look more like Thomas the Tank Engine than an anthropomorphic bug, its face flat with features designed to look as though they had been drawn on with a pen.

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Despite its ugly duckling start, the cake quickly proved popular among customers, with everyone from David Cameron (he was gifted two Colins by fellow Conservative MPs in 2012) to David Beckham, and even Taylor Swift, proving loyal celebrity fans. Today, the retailer says it sells more than 450,000 Colin cakes every single year – since the launch in 1990, that has topped over seven million cakes. And that is no mean feat given. According to Marks & Spencer, it reportedly takes 47 people to assemble each cake and 8.4 tonnes of sweets to decorate every year.

In fact Colin has become so popular that Marks & Spencer has announced entire spin-off ranges: Colin got himself a girlfriend, Connie, in 2016. Giant Colin the Groom and Connie the Bride wedding cakes can serve 40 guests, while earlier this year, Marks & Spencer unveiled an Easter Bunny Colin the Caterpillar cake that consumers described as a “thing of nightmares”. “Looks like the bunny from Donnie Darko. They should save it for Halloween, it looks demonic,” one person said.

So what is it about a Colin that makes it so much better than the rest? Is it that chocolate sponge roll cake – with its sugar-coated chocolate beans, chocolate buttercream innards and solid chocolate shell – that gives you the perfect blend of cake to accompaniments? After all, these are not just any ingredients, they are M&S ingredients. Perhaps it is the fact that it is much easier to divide up among a group of people with its easily-distinguishable segments than a traditional round sponge? Or is it just the secure familiarity of knowing what you’re going to get?

For me, being presented with Colin the Caterpillar on my birthday brings me immeasurable joy, no matter how old I am, simply because it is so nostalgic. Even in the grown-up setting of the workplace, everyone reveals their inner child when they are given a slice of Colin to take back to their desk for the afternoon.

In the current climate, uncertainty is the name of the game. It is hard to predict anything about the future. And a cake like Colin gives us that familiarity we long for. If the past three decades are anything to go by, Colin can look forward to many more years of children and adults alike vying for the best piece as soon as the knife pierces the chocolate shell.