Original 'little brown loaf' not made here. Copyright: Hovis (fair use)
Hovis ad ‘insult’ to local bakers
‘Not at all accurate or representative’ Real Bread Campaign tells ASA.
Having not had a response to a complaint submitted via the Hovis website on 2 October 2026, the Real Bread Campaign has submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority.
The complaint
We [the Real Bread Campaign] believe that the 'strength baked in' advertising campaign for Hovis breaches rules 3.1 and 3.3 of the CAP Code for non-broadcast advertising. The advertiser has chosen to omit all material facts about current company, its processes and its products. Instead, the campaign is designed to create the impression of an unbroken tradition of where, by whom, with what and how Hovis products are made, which is not at all accurate or representative of the current situation.
The campaign focuses on small, independent, local bakeries. We are shown handpainted signs for small, independent, local bakeries, including Warner Bros. bakery, on the corner of Inchmery Road and Sandhurst Road in Catford. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of such bakeries did once employ skilled bakers to handcraft loaves of Real Bread from nothing but Hovis’s patent wheatgerm flour, water, yeast, salt and perhaps a little fat. The adverts deliberately invoke nostalgia for such neighbourhood bakeries and the Hovis ‘little brown loaf’ they made.
The campaign claims it ‘celebrates our heritage, our communities’ using phrases including ‘everything Hovis® has stood for over generations’ and ‘the heart of what we do has always stayed the same’. The company and heart of what Hovis is, does and stands for has not stayed the same. Ownership of the brand has changed a number of times and what Hovis now stands for is generating profits for shareholders. The heart of what the company does today is mass-produce industrial loaves by the Chorleywood Process, in large factories far from the high streets of our local communities.
Originally and for many years, at the heart of Hovis loaves was the company’s patent wheatgerm flour, to which craft bakers added just three or four natural ingredients. Across the Hovis range today, fully-automated production lines also add E471, E472e, E282, E300, soya flour and palm oil. Some Hovis products don’t even include that wheatgerm flour upon which the brand was built. Some products also include 'fermented wheat flour': the company still hasn’t answered our question about whether that’s a ‘clean label solution’ to adding propionic acid to extend shelf life without having to name it on the ingredients list. This is all material information that the advertiser has chosen to omit from the campaign.
We further believe that invoking nostalgia for local, community bakeries, of the sort that Hovis, its now-parent company (Associated British Foods) and other industrial loaf fabricators helped to destroy, is totally inappropriate and an insult to the memories of the families who were forced out of business.
See also
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Real Bread Campaign: Finding and sharing ways to make bread better for us, our communities and planet.
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