Ocado ‘wholemeal’ is brown bread

On 27 March 2025, online retailer Ocado advised the Real Bread Campaign that the company was in the process of correcting the naming of a loaf from ‘wholemeal’ to ‘brown’, due to the product being made from a mix of wholemeal and non-wholemeal flour. 

The change comes as a direct result of the Campaign highlighting to Ocado that using the word wholemeal to name and advertise the product breaches The Bread and Flour Regulations 1998.

Ocado stated: ‘Based on our current projections, we will currently be in a position to have moved over to the new ‘brown’ artwork by the end of June, however will of course change over sooner if we can.’

Campaign coordinator Chris Young said: ‘While people eating more wholemeal Real Bread isn’t our sole focus, we very much encourage people to do so, not only on health grounds but also to reduce waste of food and resources. Misusing the word wholemeal is an abuse of trust, which undermines the positive work that its advocates do.’

Wholemeal guidance

Regulation 6 requires that: ‘There shall not be used in the labelling or advertising of bread, as part of the name of the bread, whether or not qualified by other words […] the word 'wholemeal’ unless all the flour used as an ingredient in the preparation of the bread is wholemeal.’ ‘No person shall sell or advertise for sale any bread in contravention of this regulation.’

Despite this clarity, in 2022, the Campaign found seven well-known industrial dough fabricators using the word wholemeal to market products made using up to 50% non-wholemeal flour.

Then in 2023, the Campaign found non-wholemeal flour in products sold as wholemeal by six of the UK’s ten largest supermarket chains.

A number of trading standards complaints submitted by the Campaign about these cases are still awaiting resolution, some of them pending new governmental guidance. On 19 February 2025, Defra told the Campaign: ‘The guidance is currently going through internal clearance process we expect to publish within the next month.’

Sourfaux

While accepting the company’s error on wholemeal labelling, Ocado rejected the Campaign’s call to remove the word sourdough, referring to a so-called ‘UK Baking Industry Code of Practice for the Labelling of Sourdough Bread and Rolls’.
Young responded by pointing out that the proposed code was drawn up in secrecy by and for a very small group of organisations, whose members have vested interests in profiting from making, selling and using additives and baker’s yeast. 

He went on to highlight: ‘The local, independent, artisan bakers who have been the custodians of the craft since the renaissance of UK sourdough bread making in the early 1970s were excluded from creation of the proposed code, then rejected it upon publication. It is perhaps because of this lack of legitimacy across the baking sector as a whole that it had no official standing either, having not been adopted by the government, consumer protection bodies or other regulators.’

Young concluded: ‘Given everything that’s going on in the UK and across the world, these are distractions we could do without. I’d much rather spend time on securing funding for planned projects, including helping to make Real Bread available and accessible to more people, arranging bread making in schools, and working with non-commodity grain networks on improving resilience and food security.’

As part of its proposed Honest Crust Act of updated and improved composition, labelling and marketing standards, the Campaign continues to lobby for a legal definition of wholegrain.

See also

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