Coles Was Selling You “Freshly Baked” Bread Made Months Ago. In Ireland.

This week in Corporate Fuckery: The Board Game, Coles has copped a three-year ban courtesy of the ACCC from advertising that it makes “fresh” bread. As it turns out, the bread you buy from Coles is “fresh” in the same way that your housemate’s skeezy boyfriend is “totally good for rent this week”.

Basically, Coles was advertising a range of Coles Bakery and Cuisine Royale-brand breads that claimed on the packaging to be “Baked Today, Sold Today” and “Freshly Baked In-Store”, which turned out to be stretching the truth a teensy bit in that the bread was baked months ago in places like Ireland, Germany and Denmark, frozen and shipped out here for the discerning ‘Strayan public.

Damn. Coles used to be so likeable.

The findings cast doubt on the sincerity of other flagship Coles in-store promises; ‘Coles Spring Fresh’, the tag used to sell fruit and vegetables that implies “these are fresh fruit and vegetables we are selling you”, could perhaps be taken to mean “we found this fruit in the dumpster behind Harris Farm and sprayed it with insecticides to make it Extra Safe”, while ‘Down, Down, Prices Are Down’ may actually mean “we are saving money by selling you inferior-quality foodstuffs made of old newspapers”.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the first thing that comes up when you type “bread gif” into Google image search is this:

Incredible.