The ruling determined that whole cooked “cool-down” chickens are subject to the standard 20% VAT rate applicable to hot takeaway food, rejecting the supermarket’s claim that they should be exempt.

The legal dispute stems from the regulations introduced during the controversial 2012 “pasty tax,” where the Treasury applied VAT to food kept hot for sale but exempted items that are cooling down naturally or are only “incidentally hot”.

Morrisons argued that its rotisserie chickens should be zero-rated because 80% of customers consume them cold or reheat them later. Former finance director Richard Nichols argued that the supermarket’s price-sensitive customers would likely stop buying the product if the price rose from £4.40 to over £5.28, potentially impacting the balanced diets of lower-income families, The Guardian reports.

However, the court found against the retailer, noting that the chickens were sold in foil-lined bags marked “caution: hot product” and were removed from sale after two hours while still significantly above ambient temperature. Evidence presented during the trial showed the meat remained between 42C and 45C inside the packaging, whereas a naturally cooling bird would have dropped to roughly 31.8C.

The judge concluded that the packaging was effectively designed to retain heat, meaning the product was not merely cooling down naturally. The ruling stated that Morrisons failed to disclose the heat retention features of the bags and that HMRC had never provided an unambiguous ruling that the chickens were tax-exempt. Morrisons has declined to comment on the outcome.