BROWSING Tesco supermarket’s online store, Diane Brown did a search for baking powder. She found it under a submenu entitled “Tradnl Hmbking Ingrdints”, which she assumed meant “Traditional Home-baking Ingredients”. This alerted her to the knotty problem of classification faced by large supermarkets.
Moving on to the Tesco world of “Bakery and Cakes”, she discovered a submenu enticingly entitled “World and Speciality Bread” – but when she got down to the sub-submenu, all it showed was a choice of “Irish or Speciality”. What, she wondered, sets Irish bread apart from the other breads of the world, such as naan, pitta or ciabatta? The answer, it turned out, is that…
