Loaf tanning salons. Credit: Tesco
Real Bread Campaign complaint upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority.
Loaf tanning salons. Credit: Tesco
Today (21 July 2010) the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) 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 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.
This 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: www.realbreadcampaign.org
The Real Bread Campaign is run by 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.
Ends
For more information on the Campaign, please contact Chris Young.
Real Bread Campaign: Finding and sharing ways to make bread better for us, our communities and planet.
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