Battle of the breakfast spreads – how a rival to Nutella is inflaming tensions between Algeria and France
Why, I ask. He shrugs, with the phlegmatic air of a man who has seen enough grocery trends come and go to have given up wondering how this one in particular might have come about.
When I get home I spread the El Mordjene on a cracker. It has a light gloopy texture and a sweet, hazelnutty, moreish flavour, as if it were Nutella's pale, silken cousin. I instantly have another. My wife tries it and does the same. 'Like Nutella but more sophisticated,' she pronounces.
This free and easy access to El Mordjene is a privilege. Because while plenty of North African shops in London stock the spread, in France the spread has become rarer than baked beans at breakfast. Across the Channel, El Mordjene has become a political football, the subject of a bitter trade row, a social media storm and a jumping-off point for an angry discussion about the relationship between Algeria and its former colonial ruler.
'El Mordjene is a show of pride for Algerians,' says Rachida Lamri, founder of Culturama, an Algerian cultural organisation in the UK. 'Algerians are known to be fond of their flags, now this is like the new flag: El Mordjene spread. We take it to our parties, take it to our friends, we feed it to our kids, make everyone taste it. It is like a joke against France. It says: 'We are here, we exist, we're going to sell our products, this is our identity, and we're going to do it despite you'.'
El Mordjene was launched in Algeria in 2021 by the Algerian firm Cebon. It is a mix of sugar, vegetable fat, hazelnuts, skimmed milk powder, whey, emulsifiers (such as soy lecithin) and vanilla flavoring. It quickly became popular in the domestic market. Influencers on social media touted Mordjene's superiority to Nutella, the children's breakfast behemoth made by the Italian multinational, Ferrero.
Ferrero also makes Ferrero Rocher and the children's chocolate bar Kinder Bueno, the latter of whose smooth interior El Mordjene was said to resemble. French-African shops in France began to stock the product, too; word of the delicious new spread quickly, er, spread.
The trouble began last September, when two shipments of El Mordjene were stopped at French customs. Initially, one of the reasons given was that the Algerian spread appeared to 'infringe' Nutella's trademarks. A couple of days later, however, the French ministry of agriculture confirmed that El Mordjene was banned within the EU because Algeria was not one of the countries permitted to export dairy products to the union. The skimmed milk powder in El Mordjene meant it was interdit. The authorities added that investigation was 'currently under way' to work out how the tasty paste crossed the Mediterranean in the first place. Prices rocketed to up to 30 euros per jar. Copycats sprung up, made in Turkey; French recipe writers described recipes for making your own at home.
'Clearly, [the French authorities] were looking for a loophole,' Amine Ouzlifi, a Cebon spokesman, told The New Yorker recently. 'They considered a bunch of options and finally settled on dairy products as the most viable.' He added that it was suspicious French authorities had only decided to enforce the rule once the spread became popular, but that he would not unnecessarily 'open the gates of Hell' by contesting the ban directly.
Algerian influencers and food industry professionals took umbrage, arguing that this was classic sour grapes from their old antagonists. Some suggested the ban was down to ' seum ' – a slang term that means feeling bitter or resentful – on the French part. In France, Right-wing pundits suggested that the veiled woman depicted on the El Mordjene jar was a metaphor for Islamic values being smuggled into France.
'El Mordjene started to pose a problem the second it became a star,' Habib Merouane Hadj Bekkouche, a spokesman for the Algerian Organisation for the Protection and Orientation of Consumers and their Environment, told The New Yorker. While some wondered about a possible Ferrero-backed corporate conspiracy, most saw it as old-fashioned French protectionism. ('We'll politely decline this one,' said a Ferrero representative when approached for comment, although in other pieces a spokesman refuted the idea of Ferrero involvement.)
'It has nothing to do with Nutella,' says Lamri. 'Nutella is an institution. Not everyone was going to move to El Mordjene. France did us a favour. Mordjene has gained such popularity that maybe we are taking on Nutella. The FDA [Food and Drug Administration] in the US have just validated Mordjene as safe. It's now being exported to the US. Who needs France?'
There was another delicious twist. It turned out that the offending skimmed milk powder contained in El Mordjene had itself been imported to Algeria from, of all places, Brittany. It made no difference to the French attitude. The ban continues.
'We are seeing a resurgence of counterfeiting of our product and the usurption of the Cebon brand,' Ouzlifi tells The Telegraph. 'We are taking the necessary steps to counter this.'
The El Mordjene contretemps has been amplified by the fraught political situation between France and Algeria. Relations have remained on a knife edge since Algeria won independence in 1962, following a bloody war which caused the deaths of between 400,000 and 1.5 million Algerians.
They are currently at a low ebb. Last July, Algeria withdrew its ambassador after President Macron supported Morocco's plan for an autonomous Western Sahara. In February of this year, an undocumented Algerian went on a fatal knife rampage in Mulhouse, near the borders with Switzerland and Germany. Cebon, founded by two brothers in 1997, is emblematic of Algeria's attempts to build its own industries to compete internationally.
For many Algerians, the spread row is yet more proof that France cannot bear the idea of a strong, independent Algeria. 'El Mordjene is defiance,' Lamri says. 'If you try to ban us, we will go to great lengths to still exist and be part of the dialogue. With a spread, or a flag, or a song.'
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