Ocado is to rename its Wholemeal Sourdough loaf after a baker complained its name was “misleading and illegal”.
The Real Bread Campaign said it was contacted by a micro-baker in February, who claimed the marketing of Ocado’s loaf was not lawful.
The Bread and Flour Regulations (1998) require: “There shall not be used in the labelling or advertising of bread, as part of the name of the bread, whether or not qualified by other words […] the word ‘wholemeal’ unless all the flour used as an ingredient in the preparation of the bread is wholemeal.”
Ocado’s Wholemeal Sourdough 500g and 800g loaves contain a mixture of wholemeal wheat flour (62%-65%) and wheat flour.
The Campaign wrote to Ocado in February, asking the retailer to resolve the issue by removing either the non-wholemeal flour from the products, or the word wholemeal from the products’ names and marketing.
It also asked Ocado to remove E300 (ascorbic acid) from the product, or rename it, as “additives are not used in making genuine sourdough bread”, it said.
Ocado’s response
Ocado last week wrote to the Real Bread Campaign to confirm it was in the process of changing the name of the loaves in question from ‘wholemeal’ to ‘brown’.
“Based on our current projections, we will currently be in a position to have moved over to the new ‘brown’ artwork by the end of June,” wrote the retailer.
However, Ocado rejected the Campaign’s call to remove the word “sourdough” from its loaves, referring to the UK Baking Industry Code of Practice for the Labelling of Sourdough Bread & Rolls in its reason for doing so.
An Ocado spokeswoman told The Grocer: “We always want to be fully transparent about all our products and, in the light of recent feedback, we’re in the process of updating the name of our sourdough loaf from Wholemeal Sourdough to Brown Sourdough.
“We’re making this change as quickly as we can, while minimising waste on the old packaging,” she said.
An ‘abuse of trust’
Chris Young, co-ordinator of the Real Bread Campaign, said: “Misusing the word ‘wholemeal’ is an abuse of trust, which undermines the positive work that its advocates do.”
Young added that the sourdough code referenced by Ocado was drawn up “in secrecy by and for a very small group of organisations, whose members have vested interests in profiting from making, selling and using additives and baker’s yeast”.
“The local, independent, artisan bakers who have been the custodians of the craft since the renaissance of UK sourdough breadmaking in the early 1970s were excluded from the creation of the proposed code, then rejected it upon publication.
“It is perhaps because of this lack of legitimacy across the baking sector as a whole that it had no official standing either, having not been adopted by the government, consumer protection bodies or other regulators.
“Given everything that’s going on in the UK and across the world, these are distractions we could do without. I’d much rather spend time on securing funding for planned projects, including helping to make Real Bread available and accessible to more people, arranging breadmaking in schools, and working with non-commodity grain networks on improving resilience and food security.”
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