A lovely crisis management story from the sandwich chain Pret a Manger which was beautifully handled. Pret markets itself on its handmade natural food, created daily in its 350 shops, with unsold items donated to homeless charities. It has a jokey, relaxed brand image. In addition to sandwiches, soups and drinks, Pret offers a range of its own crisps, and decided to launch a spicy tomato flavour crisp named “Virgin Mary”. Within a week, the crisps had been removed from the shelves following complaints on Twitter.

So far, so not very unusual, firms get things wrong and try to put it right. But Pret handled it within their brand values: putting the customer first, being a friendly “nice chap” type of brand. The official response, published in newspapers and online, was: “It didn’t take many complaints: it’s the strength of feeling that’s behind them that’s important. For the sake of a particular flavour of crisps, we don’t want anyone offended.”

In replies to the complainants, the company said: “We are extremely sorry that the crisp name that we had selected has offended you. This wasn’t our intention. After receiving a number of comments similar to yours, Clive (Pret’s CEO) has taken your advice and decided to remove all of the crisps from our shops… We will be donating the unsold crisps to homeless charities that we support across the country. We do listen and we have tried to react quickly.”

Note: a personal apology, an acceptance of a misjudgement, an action, and the decision to donate the crisps to homeless charities, which Pret already supports. All this underlines their “nice chap” reputation. The whole issue has cost them in cash terms, but overall, may have boosted their reputation.