Easter is a hugely popular time in the calendar for all major supermarkets, the shelfs are packed with a range of existing branded products. With such a gap in the market supermarkets themselves are creating there own ranges of seasonal own brand products, which are growing in demand and popularity.
The luxury supermarket is now competing with M&S with there high end supermarket products, this year was no different but one particular product caused a stir ;a new trio of ducklings.
If I'm actually honest I think the design of the actually products themselves is plain and nothing new. The execution again of the chocolate moulds doesn't reflect the high end supermarket brand at all, the lines around the ducks themselves aren't smooth if were compared to the likes of Hotel Chocolat.
In my eyes personally this is no surprise to me that the product has caused upset, the ducks are labelled individually. The milk chocolate duck is crispy, the white duck is called fluffy and the last duck which is a dark brown/ black colour is called ugly. The choice of names for all the ducks is poor in my opinion, crispy is an odd name to name a smooth milk chocolate! Calling the last duck ugly was always going to upset a large range of people, the whole story of the ugly duckling was poorly played out with within this easter range.
I think its a very stupid mistake for Waitrose to make, a lazy one in-fact. I don't know how no one has flagged this issue, it has been passed down to many people and no one has raised that any issue which could be caused with this product. I don't believe it would have been missed but maybe the fear to speak up to a higher member of company is too much for Waitrose's employees to risk. Racism is taken very seriously within most ( hopefully all) companies in England and any racism will cause a full investigation and sometimes even dismissal. With this is in mind I don't understand how its okay for the brand itself to not only offended possibly its employees but also the general public with such an insensitive and lazy easter product.
Waitrose soon removed the ducklings from sale and gave them a redesign. A spokesperson for the supermarket said, “We are very sorry for any upset caused by the name of this product, it was absolutely not our intention to cause any offence. We removed the product from sale several weeks ago while we changed the labelling and our ducklings are now back on sale.”
This is not the first time Waitrose have been in trouble for there product designs, they created a identical range of slabs which copied the Hotel Chocolat original design.
Hotel Chocolat made a clever move to replace every unopened or unfinished £2 Waitrose slab with one of its own (priced at £3.95) demonstrated absolute confidence in the product quality of Hotel Chocolat and showed this was not about the money.
In the end Waitrose said they would stop the production of anymore chocolate slabs, the idea of Waitrose losing there respect and reputation over copying the designs of successful companies soon stopped them in there tracks.
Why do they keep making basic mistakes? If you're going to market yourself as a high end supermarket brand then you need to fulfil the responsibilities that come with it.
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