Easter Chocolate Ducklings Pulled From Shelves Over ‘Racist’ Backlash

We love Easter. There’s the egg hunts to look forward to, the visits with the Easter Bunny, and of course the Easter basket, loaded up with all the goods. From jellybeans to peanut butter eggs and chocolate bunnies, sugar high gets a whole new meaning on this holiday.

And while Easter candy is typically seen as fun and happy, there’s one recent sugary product that’s gotten a lot of hate lately: A line of chocolate ducklings that were originally found at a British supermarket called Waitrose.

The chocolate ducklings come in a pack of three made of different kinds of chocolate, and each one was labeled with its own name: “Crispy” for the milk chocolate duckling, “Fluffy” for the white chocolate duckling, and here’s where the controversy is coming in: The dark chocolate one is named “Ugly.”

Yes, you read that right. They named the duckling “Ugly.” Customers are pretty ticked off about this, and also kind of confused. Out of all the names they could’ve chose, that’s the one they picked? Like, how did that get through the marketing department, ya know?

The angry customer who originally found the chooclates tweeted out, “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?????”

The supermarket has since apologized once they realized their mistake. On top of that, they even went to the lengths to take the chocolates off the shelf, change the labeling of the product, and then put it back for resale.

“We are very sorry for any upset caused by the name of this product, it was absolutely not our intention to cause any offence,” the stated. “We removed the product from sale several weeks ago while we changed the labelling and our ducklings are now back on sale.”

Okay, so we’re good then, right? Wrong.

The problem now is that there are many other people who didn’t find the chocolates offensive, and are actually outraged that the supermarket had to even apologize for such a petty problem.

“It’s only chocolate, get a life!” someone wrote.

“Ooh crispy duck, fluffy duck and ugly duck what’s so bad about that? My mum had hens called chicken pie and chicken dinner, much the same dark humour,” someone else wrote.

Additionally, many others believe that the name “Ugly” came from the old classic story of the Ugly Duckling. “Don’t forget, the ugly duckling turns out to be a swan, which is seen as one of the most beautiful and elegant creatures out there,” someone reminded us on Twitter.

Others were just pissed off that the three chocolates cost so much: “The fact that this costs £8 is far more offensive,” someone pointed out.

Fair point.

I guess you can’t please everyone! We’d love to get your opinion on this one. What do you think: Were the names of these chocolates offensive to you, or do you think they were innocent?