not allowed to sell fresh yeast!

elsien

Over 10 year old thread resurrected.
Things may have changed somewhat since the initial OP....

pumpkinlife

Ha didn't even notice that!

Callie22

ChrisK..... wrote: »

You were dreaming. You don't HAVE to sell someone your house or car, just because they want it. Hope you see why that's the law

There's a lot of stuff on the internet which suggests that bakeries have to give you fresh yeast if asked because it's a 'living product' and they aren't allowed to sell 'living things'. However, that isn't true (as far as I'm aware. I certainly never saw any DEFRA regs on yeast and I was a baker for a few years) - and if supermarkets can't sell 'living things' then how come most supermarkets sell live mussels, for example?

Certainly when I was a baker we'd always give yeast to anyone who asked, it was cheap enough to buy (when I was buying it, we used the Pinnacle stuff and it was a quid for a kilo block, although I'd imagine it's gone up a bit now …) and tbh it had a pretty limited shelf-life so giving it away was often of benefit to us, since we got through so much. Most people only wanted a few tablespoons-worth anyway. The problem is that food hygiene regulations have become much, much stricter and there are all sorts of regulations now about hazard and critical control points and retailers are much more likely to be held liable if something goes wrong. This is fair enough if they're doing something wrong but it has made companies much more risk-averse and giving food away from a retail premises falls into that odd grey area where you'd assume that you're no longer responsible for someone doing something stupid with it but in fact you are. The hassle of labelling and giving people storage and usage guidelines, and allergy labelling and so on has made it much more difficult to be 'helpful' and give yeast away, and for the small quantities (and short shelf-life) it's probably not worth a lot of supermarkets adding it to their systems so they can sell it.