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For more than eight years, Dave's Killer Bread has marketed its seed-rich loaves with the personal testimony of its reformed-convict founder, Dave Dahl.
But with Dahl facing prison for allegedly attacking police last November, the company has taken his words off its wrappers.
A redesigned label, which debuted in April and gradually expanded across all Dave's Killer Bread loaves, keeps a cartoon of Dahl with a guitar at the center of the logo. But it removes his first-person narrative, changing it to a third-person history.
"What started as one man's journey has turned into so much more," the bread wrappers now read.
The change begins to answer the question of how the Milwaukie-based bakery and its New York investors will market Dave's Killer Bread while its founder and frontman awaits trial for allegedly ramming his Cadillac Escalade into Washington County sheriff's patrol cars.
Dave's Killer Bread spokeswoman Gabrielle Enfield confirms the company changed its packaging in April.
"But you also likely noticed that Dave is front and center on our new packaging," Enfield says, "as the centerpiece of our brand."
Until this summer, Dahl's testimony on wrappers read:
The new design says:
In January, WW examined Dahl's rise from drug dealing to celebrity baker, and the subsequent breakdown of his redemption story.
Since then, Dave's Killer Bread—whose ownership is split between the Dahl family and New York-based Goode Partners—has focused its marketing away from Dahl to the company's humanitarian work.
National magazine Fast Company last week profiled Dave's Killer Bread's policy of hiring ex-convicts. The story, remarkably, contains no mention of Dahl's assault or arrest.
Here are the new Dave's Killer Bread wrappers:
WWeek 2015