The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) today upheld a complaint from the Real Bread Campaign that a magazine advertisement for Tesco in-store bakeries breached the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) Code’s clause on truthfulness.

The headline text of the advertisement, read: “Fresh bread.  Baked from scratch in our in store bakery.  Using 100% British flour.  So every single loaf is genuinely British…Born and bread,” despite the fact that Tesco only bakes loaves from scratch in 504 of its 2,362 UK stores and some are produced with imported flour.  In its response to the complaint, Tesco admitted that far more (1,288) of its in-store bakeries merely re-bake loaves that were part-baked elsewhere.

In its adjudication, the ASA stated: ‘Because we considered that the ad implied that all Tesco stores with a bakery facility baked bread from scratch, which was true of only a limited number of stores, we concluded the ad was likely to mislead.’

Real Bread Campaign working party chair Iain Loe said:

‘We believe that this ruling sends an important message to unscrupulous advertisers:   if you plan to hide or distort the facts in an attempt to draw customers away from small, independent bakeries that make an honest living baking honest loaves, the people of Britain won’t stand for it.’

The full complaint, the ASA adjudication and how people can take action can be found at: http://www.realbreadcampaign.org/

The Real Bread Campaign is part of the UK charity Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming.  The Campaign supports the baking of more Real Bread and encourages people to eat more locally produced loaves.  People wanting genuinely fresh Real Bread, support members of their own local communities and to help keep our high streets alive can search the Real Bread Finder on the Campaign’s website.

In March 2010, the Real Bread Campaign published ‘Are Supermarket Bloomers Pants?’ a report which revealed that almost no loaves produced by the in-store bakeries of six major supermarket chains met even the Campaign’s  basic Real Bread criterion of being produced without artificial additives and that many were re-baked, rather than freshly baked.

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 For more information on the Campaign, please contact Chris Young on:  chris@sustainweb.org or 020 7837 1228

Notes to editors:

1. In their response to the complaint Tesco reported that only 504 stores baked loaves from scratch.
2. The Tesco website http://www.tescoplc.com/plc/about_us/map/ states that the chain has 2,362 UK stores (viewed 15th April and again 15th July 2010).
3. The second part of the complaint that in fact, as only noted in the very small print below the advertisement, not all Tesco in-store bakery loaves were 100% British, was not upheld by the ASA.