In a bizarre case, a five-year-old girl in Australia was denied her personalised jar of Nutella with her name printed on it because her name is Isis. Heather Taylor, who has two children, named her daughter after the Egyptian goddess Isis, revered as a matriarch and friend of the disadvantaged. She has named her 8-year-old son Odhinn after a god in Nordic mythology. Taylor's sister tried to buy five personalised jars which are labelled with the recipient's name for her nephew Odhinn and her niece Isis from a Myer department store in Shellharbour, New South Wales.
Taylor was quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald as saying that both names were initially flagged as problematic by a computer. After some negotiation, Odhinn was deemed acceptable but the store manager drew the line at Isis, an acronym commonly used to denote Islamic State. Myer told Taylor that Nutella had a protocol for acceptable names and directed her to Nutella's parent company, Ferrero Australia.
Ferrero chief executive Craig Barker personally contacted her the next day to stand by the company's position. "I'm really quite upset by this. You are actually making my daughter's name dirty. You are choosing to refuse my daughter's name in case the public refers to it negatively," Taylor told Barker. The Nutella campaign, which allows fans of the hazelnut spread to personalise a 750 gramme or one kilogramme jar, was launched in September.
In a statement, Ferrero Australia confirmed the label in question was not approved for printing due to its sensitive nature.
"Like all campaigns, there needs to be consistency in the way terms and conditions are applied," the company said. "Unfortunately, this has meant there have been occasions where a label has not been approved on the basis that it could have been misinterpreted by the broader community or viewed as inappropriate," it said.
The campaign was intended to be used in "a fun and joyful way", the statement said. ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has come into common parlance only in the past two years, an alternative name for IS (Islamic State), Daesh or ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant).
The terror group has seized territory in both Syria and Iraq and uses brutal methods. Taylor said she would not be in favour of putting the name "Hitler" on a jar of Nutella, but her case was different because she named her daughter before the rise of the IS. She also has no intention of changing her daughter's name, and argues the name Isis needed to be reclaimed. "This is an acronym that is used incorrectly by the media that Nutella are supporting," Taylor said. "We need to be calling the Daesh death cult by their name, Daesh."
