The practice of creating a brand name to conjure up in shoppers’ minds an idyllic, but entirely fictional, farm is the favoured sleight of hand of many supermarket retailers. It encourages customers to think, for example, of pigs snuffling around leafy fields instead of the far more harrowing steel and concrete reality of a crowded meat factory. While these activities have been roundly condemned and criticised, with the NFU even filing a formal complaint against one chain, they still persist.

In January this year, a British supermarket withdrew its own-brand, ‘everyday value’, wrapped, sliced loaf. In its place, at a similar price point of around 40p, is a near-identical loaf, marketed under the brand name ‘H W Nevill’. It made me wonder if the supermarket in question is now attempting to use a fake bakery name to convince shoppers to part with their dough? After all, its so-called ‘value’ loaf received no stars in a 2013 Guardian taste test, with the reviewer commenting that “the dough is awful, sour and claggy”, so perhaps it needed an image makeover.

Ex-bakery

On its website, the retailer boasts that, “back in 1872, Henry William Nevill founded his first bakery and started a proud baking tradition. Almost 150 years later, our hero bakers take their craft just as seriously as Henry did. Using only quality ingredients, they work through the night to create delicious bakery favourites for the whole family to enjoy.”

I decided to do a bit of digging around and found that Nevill did indeed begin as an independent company, with bakeries in Herne Hill, Acton and Leytonstone. But that was a long time ago. In the middle of the last century, it was gobbled up by industrial milling and baking giant Allied Bakeries, later to become Associated British Foods (ABF), now an even bigger behemoth that also owns Primark.

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