The new Boaty McBoatface? Sainsbury’s has renamed its vegan cheese following a customer rant on Facebook

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It's Sainsburys' own Boaty McBoatface moment: the supermarket has given its vegan cheese a rather less descriptive name, after a customer suggested on Facebook it should "call it Gary or something".

The anonymous cheese lover posted an exclamation mark-laden rant after she objected to Sainsbury's referring to its coconut-based cheese alternative as "cheese".

"CHEESE IS NOT MADE WITH COCONUTS," she wrote.

"Call it Gary or something just don't call it Cheese because IT'S NOT CHEESE!!!!!

"Just to recap incase [sic] you have forgotten — Cheese is nutritious food made mostly from the milk of cows but also other mammals, including sheep, goats, buffalo, reindeer, camels and yaks."

Here's that rant in full:

Rather than taking offence, Sainsbury's decided to take heed – and unveiled its latest product in a Facebook post: 

It's not the first time Sainsbury's has reacted like this to a customer pointing out a flaw in its naming policy. 

Back in 2012, it renamed its tiger bread "giraffe bread" after 3 1/2 year-old Lily Robinson wrote to it to point out it looked much more like a giraffe.

Customer service adviser Chris King agreed. "It looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn't it?" he pointed out.

Meanwhile, earlier this year "Boaty McBoatface" became a household name after the National Environment Research Council (NERC) unwisely allowed the public to suggest names for its new, £200m, polar research vessel. 

That time, the NERC decided to ignore the public vote and call its boat the RRS Sir David Attenborough (Boaty McBoatface won the public vote by a landslide, natch).

However, the name did live on – in the form of one of the vessel's remotely operated vehicles. Proof, perhaps, that that saying about the "wisdom of crowds" doesn't always ring true…

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