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| Halal Hot Cross Buns (www.iol.co.za) |
Last week saw some members of the Christian community angried at Woolworths for putting a halal certification mark on packages of hot cross buns sold ahead of Easter.
In emails, Facebook messages and Twitter posts, the fired-up Christians argued that hot cross buns have special meaning in their religion, and so the halal symbol (which indicates the food is permissable for Muslims to eat, under Islamic law), should not be used, according to the Mercury.
A tweet from Tony Seifart read: “Woolworths SA clearly has no respect for the Christian Faith to make hot cross buns halaal.”
Was Woolworths wrong to try and make hot cross buns available to all its clients? According to the Mercury article (29 March) people feel that Woolworths is not being insensitive to Christians. In fact, they are being sensitive to the food certification requirement to accommodate all communities by including the halaal and kosher marks.
We need to ask ourselves how important are symbols in our society? From a marketing/ communication point of view, we can not ignore the meaning of symbols in our multicultural society. It might not be important to us personally, but we should never loose sight of the bigger picture.
Woolworths may have been trying to do the right thing but then again it needed to evaluate how this message would be taken by the public including Muslims. Signs are important but I think its about how ignorant observant people can be to react on such a matter.
ReplyDeleteI understand Woolies reasons for the Halaal sticker, but ignorance is one thing and not doing your homework on the products you sell, is enough to send me to another food store to buy hot cross buns .
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