Which supermarkets sell sourdough?

People often ask the Real Bread Campaign where they can get genuine sourdough, or other Real Bread. The two options we encourage people to explore are to:

• Make your own Real Bread.
• Buy from a local, independently-owned Real Bread bakery.

You can find free recipes on our website, which is also where you can find the Real Bread Map and details of The Real Bread Loaf Mark that you can look for while out and about.

Despite our best efforts over the past 17 years, however, we sadly accept that, currently, neither homebaking or buying from an indie bakery is always a truly realistic option for many people in the UK.

Supermarket sourdough

The most recent list of around 180 Real Bread Loaf Mark licensees included two nationally-available brands, both of which make genuine sourdough bread. To date, no supermarket has ever added its details to our Real Bread Map or signed up to the Real Bread Loaf Mark scheme. 

Always read the label

That’s not to say that no multiple retailer has genuine sourdough or other Real Bread in its own brand range, it just means you’ll need to read ingredients lists – which we always strongly encourage anyway.

If a product contains any additive (as defined in food law), it’s not what we call Real Bread. If the ingredients list includes the word ‘yeast’, any additive, or a raising agent other than a live sourdough starter culture (which might not be named as it’s just flour and water) then it’s not genuine sourdough bread.

Please see other articles on our website about what ‘fermented wheat flour’ on an ingredients list is. You might think it’s just a sourdough starter but it can instead mean a manufacturer has added a ‘label friendly’ preservative from a ‘clean label solutions’ supplier in order to enhance profitability - sorry, ‘durability’, by which they mean shelf life. 

Why doesn’t the Campaign make a list of what’s available?

The Real Bread Campaign is run on a shoestring, so we choose not to use our very, very limited resources on giving free promotion to supermarkets and industrial dough fabricators, which have gazillions to spend on their own marketing.*

Another factor is that supermarket products lines change very frequently. When we investigated supermarket sourdough and sourfaux in the past, the information we gathered was soon out of date.

Back to the subject of rising costs and our funding shortfall, please consider heading to our website to join the Campaign in support of our charity’s work.

 

*It’s bad enough having to spend our time highlighting information that big companies choose not to tell you, or facts that they invest in actively misdirecting you away from. (Naming no names…because we can’t afford to get sued, even when it’s the truth.)