Christchurch shop owner's Weetabix halted at border

  • 29/06/2017
Christchurch, United Kingdom, Foods
The store has been waiting more than eight weeks for their stock. Photo credit: Facebook/ A Little Bit Of Britain

A Christchurch retailer's Weetabix order has been detained at the border after complaints from Sanitarium, who make Weetbix. 

Lisa Wilson says the food giant will only let her sell the UK cereal product with the name crossed out.

"Sanitarium found out that there's Weetabix on the [inbound] container and asked customs to detain it," Ms Wilson told RadioLIVE's Mark Sainsbury.

"So our container got held up for a week at port until a customs officer could come out.

"They've got a border protection law on any wheat based cereal that comes in [and] are able to ring up and ask what it is."

Ms Wilson sells a small amount of Weetabix boxes in her A Little Bit Of Britain shop in Christchurch and says she won't be giving in.

"I feel like it is quite unfair, we're just a small business," Ms Wilson says.

"It tastes different, the box is completely different, so you know we are just trying to bring a bit of taste of home for our British ex-pats."

Christchurch, Foods, United Kingdom
Sanitarium aren't happy with the product's packaging. Photo credit: Facebook/ A Little Bit of Britain

Support has been flooding in for the small business. 

"We've had lots of our British ex-pats obviously supporting us," she says.

"We came in this morning to the shop to thousands of messages [and] our Facebook page is blowing with support.

"We've had some Kiwis backing us as well which is pretty cool."

While some stock that had been detained has now been released, all of the Weetabix products are still being held.

"[Its] really frustrating, because we've already paid for that product and it's just sitting in the ship warehouse," Ms Wilson said.

A Sanitarium spokesperson told Fairfax the company's firm stance was to protect its brand.

Newshub.