Giraffe bread and other food rebrandings
Sainsbury's has rebranded tiger bread as giraffe bread. Find out why and discover some other foods that changed name.
Sainsbury’s has announced that it’s changing the name of tiger bread to giraffe bread following a question from a three-and-a-half-year-old girl.
Lily Robinson wrote to the supermarket’s customer service department to ask “Why is tiger bread called tiger bread? It should be called giraffe bread.”
A savvy customer manager called Chris King (then aged 27 and a third) wrote back, agreeing with Lily. “I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea - it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn't it?" he replied, enclosing a £3 gift card.
Lily’s mum then posted photos of the letters online, where the story went viral on both Facebook and Twitter. A campaign to rename the bread was launched on Facebook and Sainsbury’s has now announced that it will be calling it giraffe bread from now on.
Tiger bread is made by brushing a rice paste onto a bloomer loaf before baking, which then cracks as it dries, forming the distinctive pattern.
But tiger bread isn’t the only food to have been rebranded. Many of us remember Marathon becoming Snickers and Opal Fruits becoming Starburst. Here are some other examples:
Chinese gooseberry to kiwi fruit
This now ubiquitous green fruit originated in China and didn’t find its way to the Western world until the beginning of the twentieth century. Befitting its origins, it was originally called the Chinese gooseberry. In the 1950s, growers in New Zealand were asked to change its name by their American customers to a more marketable one (remember this was at the height of US-Chinese tensions), so they paid tribute to their national symbol – the flightless kiwi bird.
Prunes to dried plums
California marketing types thought they’d rebrand the humble prune as dried plums in an attempt to boost sales and rid of the fruit of its ‘bowel-moving’ image. So that’s what they’re known as in the States. Over here, they’re still prunes.
Coco Pops to Choco Krispies
This rebranding turned out to be a sales and PR disaster for Kellogg’s, who received a million complaints. Coco Pops swiftly returned to the shelves.
Chocolate Beans to Smarties
Smarties is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year with the release of a limited edition ‘retro style’ hexagonal tube. But the history of the brightly coloured chocolate actually dates way before that. They were first manufactured in 1882 by H I Rowntree & Co in York as plain old Chocolate Beans. They were rebranded as Smarties Chocolate Beans in 1937 but in 1977 Trading Standards forced Nestle to drop the ‘chocolate beans’ as they deemed the use of the word ‘beans’ misleading.
More tasty morsels
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