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Waitrose has apologised after it was accused of selling “racist” chocolate Easter ducklings, even as others are calling the criticism overblown.
People complained about a set of three chocolate ducks which included the white chocolate ducking called “fluffy”, a milk chocolate called “crispy” and a dark chocolate one called “ugly”.
Twitter users expressed their ire online, with one person saying it “doesn’t look good” for the retail giant:
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?????
Many people thought that calling a dark chocolate duckling 'ugly' was racist
Others argued that the duck's name comes from Hans Christian Anderson's story The Ugly Duckling - not racism
And other people think the furore is a bit ridiculous
In response to the complaints, Waitrose temporarily withdrew the ducklings from sale , before redesigning the packaging and removing the names.
A Waitrose spokesman 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.
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