Rich Tea Biscuits UK: Where to Buy, Prices and Best Options 2026

The cheapest Rich Tea biscuits in the UK are the supermarkets’ own, and the gap is not small. Sainsbury’s own 200g pack was 32p on 10 August 2026 — £1.60 a kilo. The McVitie’s pack sitting on the same shelf was £5.67 to £6.33 a kilo depending on which shop you were standing in.

That is the whole decision, and everything below is the detail behind it.

Where can you buy Rich Tea biscuits in the UK?

Every major supermarket, plus the discounters — and B&M, a discounter, is where the branded pack is cheapest.

We priced Rich Tea at seven retailers on their own sites: Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose, Aldi, Ocado and B&M. All seven had it, though not all in the same form. Waitrose, for instance, sells no round own-brand Rich Tea at all — only its own fingers.

Four retailers could not be priced. Tesco’s site returned a security block on every attempt, Iceland returned an access-denied page and the Co-op’s product search came back empty. Lidl’s own site search for “rich tea” returned no match, which is not the same as saying the stores do not carry it — Lidl simply does not list most of its grocery range online.

So the honest version of “where to buy” is: anywhere that sells biscuits. The useful question is which one, and that comes down to the number on the shelf edge rather than the one on the front of the pack.

How much do Rich Tea biscuits cost in 2026?

From 32p to £1.90 for a standard pack, which is £1.60 to £6.33 a kilo.

The own-brand and value packs first. These are the plain round Rich Tea biscuits, the direct equivalent of the McVitie’s pack.

Belmont is Aldi’s own biscuit label and Lyons is a brand rather than an own-label, sold here by Morrisons; the Ocado row is M&S. Sainsbury’s carries an “Aldi Price Match” flag on its 32p pack, and the two do land within a third of a penny of each other per 100g — Sainsbury’s matched the rate rather than the pack, which is why its pack is a third smaller.

Now the branded packs.

Two things fall straight out of that table. The same 300g pack costs 20p more at Morrisons than at Sainsbury’s, a 12% difference for an identical object. And every twin pack beats every single pack per kilo, at every shop that sells both.

Which Rich Tea biscuits are the best value?

Sainsbury’s own at £1.60 a kilo, and it is not close.

Using the 8.3g per biscuit that McVitie’s prints on its own nutrition panel, a 300g pack is about 36 biscuits. Converting the shelf prices into pence per biscuit puts the range in domestic terms:

A biscuit a day for a year is £4.85 of Sainsbury’s own or £19.19 of Morrisons’ McVitie’s. That is the size of the decision, and it is a small one — which is worth saying plainly, because a lot of price-comparison writing implies otherwise.

Is McVitie’s Rich Tea worth the extra?

That is a taste question, but the size of the premium is not: it is three and a half to four times the cheapest own-brand, per kilo.

We are not going to tell you the branded one tastes the same, because we have not run a blind test and neither has anyone else who writes this sentence. What we can do is describe the premium accurately. At £5.67 a kilo against £1.60, McVitie’s costs 3.5 times the cheapest own-brand; against Morrisons’ £6.33 it is 4.0 times.

If you want the brand, there are two levers worth knowing about, and both were live on the day we checked:

• Buy the twin pack. B&M’s 2 x 300g at £2.79 is £4.65 a kilo — 18% below the cheapest single 300g pack anywhere in the table. Sainsbury’s and Ocado at £2.95 are close behind.
• Check the loyalty price. Sainsbury’s showed McVitie’s Rich Tea The Light One at £1.70, or £1.25 with a Nectar card. Ocado had the same product on promotion at £1.35, down from £1.70. Neither of those is a permanent price and both will have moved by the time you read this.

Which Rich Tea varieties are actually on sale?

Five: the classic round one, the Light one, fingers, a mixed triple pack and a gluten-free version. A sixth, Rich Tea Cocoa, shows up in listings but was not stocked anywhere we checked.

A few notes on that list. The fingers are a different biscuit in the same family — longer, narrower, and cheaper per kilo in own-brand form than the round ones from McVitie’s. The triple pack is 815g of mixed Rich Tea, Digestives and Hobnobs, so it is only good value if you want all three. The gluten-free Schär version is a genuinely different product at a genuinely different price, ranging from £1.62 at Asda to £1.80 at Waitrose, and there is no cheap own-brand alternative to it.

Rich Tea Cocoa is the one to stop looking for. It appears on price-comparison listings, but it was absent from every retailer search we ran, including a search for the product by name — so we cannot tell you where to buy it.

What is a Rich Tea biscuit, and is it vegan?

A plain, lightly sweet wheat biscuit built for dunking — and the pack says vegetarian, not vegan.

The recipe is close to the oldest thing in the British biscuit aisle. Rich Teas were originally sold simply as tea biscuits, intended as something plain to eat between courses, and McVitie’s reduced the diameter in 1891 for London tastes. The “rich” refers to the sugar, which was the luxury part in the nineteenth century and is now the least remarkable thing about it: McVitie’s own panel gives 1.5g of sugar per biscuit.

The rest of the panel, per biscuit: 8.3g, 38kcal, 1.3g fat, 0.6g saturates, 0.07g salt. Per 100g it is 460kcal.

On the vegan question, the answer is more careful than the internet’s. McVitie’s pack copy says “Suitable for Vegetarians” and makes no vegan claim, alongside “no hydrogenated vegetable oil”, “no artificial colours or flavours” and RSPO-certified palm oil. Several third-party sites describe Rich Tea as vegan. We have followed the manufacturer’s own wording, because a recipe that happens to contain no animal ingredients is not the same as a manufacturer willing to certify it — and recipes change. If it matters to you, read the pack in front of you rather than any article, including this one.

One more thing worth knowing before you shop: Rich Tea is a description, not a trademark. That is why every supermarket sells one, and it is the reason a 32p pack and a £1.90 pack can sit on the same shelf. Its near neighbours — Marie, Nice, Malted Milk, Osborne — are different biscuits, and a Rich Tea Finger is a different size and price from a round Rich Tea.

What this does not tell you

Whether any of this will still be true next week, and what Tesco charges.

Prices in this article are a single reading on a single day. UK supermarket prices move weekly, loyalty prices move faster than that, and two of the numbers above were explicitly promotional. The ranking by price per kilo is the part likely to survive; the individual pence are not.

Online prices are also not always shelf prices. Every figure here came from a retailer’s online grocery listing, and B&M’s in particular is a chain whose in-store pricing does not always match. For Aldi, the £0.49 is the site’s own listed price rather than something we saw on a shelf.

And there is a real gap in the coverage. Tesco is the largest grocer in the country and it is not in the tables, because its site would not serve us a page. The same goes for Iceland, the Co-op and Lidl. A price comparison missing the biggest player is a partial one, and it would be dishonest to present the seven shops here as the whole market.

For what it is worth, the range is wider still than the tables suggest: Trolley, which tracks a larger set of shops than we could open, listed the same 300g McVitie’s pack between £1.00 and £11.19 on the same day. The top of that range is a reseller listing, not a supermarket, and it is the clearest argument for buying biscuits in a shop that sells food rather than in a marketplace.

Sources

Checked on 10 August 2026. Every price is a snapshot from that day.

Two notes on how those were checked. Most UK grocery sites reject command-line requests, so all but Morrisons and Trolley were opened in a browser and read there. Where a URL could be checked from the command line it was requested alongside a deliberately wrong path on the same domain, which is how we know Trolley’s page is real rather than a site that answers everything with “200”.