Tesco wins Total Bull award for fake farm branding

Our new campaign, Total Bull, calls out the biggest bull on your supermarket shelves. We are awarding our first Total Bull award to Tesco for their unflinching commitment to fake farm branding.

Supermarkets are selling meat under fake farm names, deliberately encouraging consumers to believe that the meat is sourced from small-scale producers. We believe this is peddling a load of bull. For all shoppers know, behind the bucolic mirage could lie a high-intensity, unsustainable mega farm. Tesco are not the only supermarkets to use made up farm names in their branding. Other fake farm ranges include Asda’s ‘Farm Stores’, which features an old-fashioned barn and tractor on the label, Lidl’s ‘Birchwood Farm’ meat range (which is marketed as ‘Strathvale Farm’ in Scotland), Aldi’s ‘Ashfield Farm’ and Marks and Spencer’s ‘Oakham’ chicken.

Despite Tesco’s choice of very British-sounding names, the company’s website acknowledges that not all of the meat sold in their Woodside Farms pork range will have come from UK farms. Even for meats which are sourced from UK farms, such as ‘Willow Farms’ chicken, some meat may have been produced under conditions very far from those implied by their labels, in the growing number of mega-farms invading the UK’s countryside, many of which are reported to supply Tesco.

Tell Tesco this is Total Bull!

Think fake farm branding is a load of bull? Please join us and write to Tesco’s CEO, Dave Lewis, asking him to drop the labelling. Share our postcard on Facebook and tweet using the hashtag #TotalBull.

Read the full press release.