Fake Farm Brand

Fake farm brands are a marketing technique designed to package factory-farmed products as if they came from small, family-run farms. In reality, the farm doesn’t exist and the products almost certainly came from a filthy, industrial, high-output factory farm.

These brands evoke heritage, trust, and locality in the mind of the consumer, successfully hiding the industrial reality that would cause them to shop elsewhere. After all, ‘Any Old Filthy Factory’ doesn’t sell as well as ‘Caledonian Gold’ or ‘Willow Farm.’

Here are some of the most prominent fake farm brands to look out for:

• Woodside Farms (Tesco)
• Willow Farms (Tesco)
• Ashfield Farm (Aldi)
• Birchwood (Lidl)
• Farm Stores (Asda)
• Oakham Gold (M&S)
• Caledonian Gold (M&S)

The reality behind these names is a whole lot less picturesque. Caledonian Gold Scottish Salmon (M&S) comes from Scottish Sea Farms, a company that is not even Scottish-owned and is linked to disease, lice infestations, and toxic pollution.

Tesco’s Woodside Farm is a fake farm under which pork products are sold. In reality, the meat is produced by Big Ag companies like Cranswick PLC, renowned for incarcerating pregnant pigs in cages and slamming piglets onto concrete floors to kill them. Tesco’s Willow Farm poultry was actually traced back to 2sisters, a multi-billion-pound company which was investigated by the Food Standards Agency for serious breaches of food safety regulations.

And Aldi’s Ashfield Farms’ chicken also comes from 2sisters, a company that has also managed to deforest the Amazon, cause severe suffering to animals, and sever the fingers of workers. A real pillar of the community.

Small, independent farmers hate this as much as we do, calling on supermarkets to stop the dishonest practice of “farmwashing”. But still, they continue, selling us a farm-washed, welfare-washed version of reality.

Don’t buy it.