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Well, that escalated quickly. What began as a few shoppers using Twitter to express their dismay at Sainsbury’s lack of houmous has rapidly spiralled into #houmousgate – with the newspapers proclaiming a national shortage of the chickpea dip.

According to a story in one local newspaper yesterday, this is a “middle class lunchbox catastrophe of epic proportions” affecting “the big-name stores nationwide”, with “no end date to the shortage yet announced”.

Which isn’t exactly true.

In fact, houmous is still readily available in all of the major mults bar Sainsbury’s. And even Sainsbury’s expects it to be back in stores by the end of the week.

This wasn’t some kind of national crisis to equal #horsegate or even #vegcrisis – it was a manufacturing problem at one supplier that caused two retailers to temporarily pull products from shelves. There were no food safety implications, and it wasn’t even linked to Brexit (as far as we know).

So why did such an innocuous story end up with its own hashtag and a front page spot in the nationals – earning it a place alongside one of the biggest food scandals this country has ever seen? It’s especially remarkable given Morrisons has a genuine safety scandal on its hands with the discovery of needles inside its green beans.

As far as I see it, this is a classic case of what happens when brands and retailers are cagey with the truth, leaving everyone to fill in the gaps with assumptions and conjecture.

By refusing to shed light on exactly what is going on, Bakkavor and the supermarkets have opened the floodgates on Chinese whispers, with the story becoming ever more hysterical as it filters down through the nationals to the local press.

If people have complained of ‘strange’ tasting houmous over Twitter, no one is going to think this was simply a case of a machine breaking down. They are going to wonder what caused that strange taste. And simply insisting there was no food safety implications won’t be enough to reassure consumers – after all, even Horsegate wasn’t a food safety issue.

The same is true when it comes to which retailers have been affected. Despite only Sainsbury’s and M&S confirming they had a problem with their houmous, Tesco has also been dragged in. We don’t know if the manufacturing problem at Bakkavor had anything to do with complaints the supermarket’s houmous tasted ‘metallic’ – but of course everyone is assuming it had.

I understand the reluctance to speak to the press, especially given the secrecy around supermarket own-label contracts, and the potential reputational damage stories like this can cause. But there is a risk that withholding information just leads to the spread of ever more hysterical rumours.

Giving the honest (and often boring) explanation of what is actually going on is often the quickest way to kill a story dead. If you have nothing to hide, don’t hide it. 

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