A leading British supermarket has been forced to apologise after suffering backlash over their Easter chocolate ducklings, with some customers branding them 'racist'.
Waitrose, a supermarket chain with around 350 locations in the United Kingdom, recently released a set of chocolate ducklings in anticipation of Easter, selling for around £8, but some customers are upset at the way the ducklings have been named, in a supermarket snafu that has caused plenty of debate online.
The chocolate ducklings come in a set of three, with customers able to enjoy a milk chocolate, white chocolate and dark chocolate duckling.
But while the milk chocolate one was described as 'crispy' and the white chocolate one described as 'fluffy', people aren't happy with how the dark chocolate one was described.
"Crispy, Fluffy and Ugly - trio of Easter ducklings at #waitrose . Ugly is the dark one on the right. Overheard women saying 'this is not right', I agree, doesn’t look good at all. Thousands of other options... why #ugly?????" said Twitter user @livia_aliberti, but people didn't agree with the sentiment at all.
"It’s an unfortunate mistake. I’d be surprised if this was done intentionally," replied @Farooqelx, but Waitrose acted quickly, removing the ducklings from shelves so they could change the packaging, and releasing a statement apologising for any misunderstandings they might have caused.
"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 isn't the only time that chocolate has caused chaos - this riot in France was all over Nutella:However, not everyone is happy that the supermarket was forced to change the name, and many Twitter users are complaining about what they view as political correctness gone wild.
"Are @waitrose actually having to remove a chocolate Duck for sale because they called it an ugly duckling and people think it's racist," asked @LouiseMx_ , while @sineadhannah6 added: "Lol.. Waitrose removing Easter duck named 'ugly' because its [sic] racist ??♀️? who has the time or inclination to think to complain about this stuff?"
It's believed that the labels for the ducklings came from the fairy tale The Ugly Duckling, from the Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen.
