Last May, Lily Robinson wrote the letter, which asked: ‘Why is tiger bread called tiger bread? It should be called giraffe bread. Love from Lily Robinson age 3 and 1/2.’

Chris King, a member of the Sainsbuy’s customer service team, wrote a letter back. It said: ‘I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea – it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it?’

The reply continued: ‘It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripey like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.’ He also included a £3 Sainsbury’s gift card and signed the letter ‘Chris King (age 27 & 1/3).’

Her mother posted the letters on her blog. After a brief flurry of interest last summer on Twitter, the story again went viral on social media sites last week.

Currently, a Facebook post about the tiger bread letters has been liked over 154,000 times and shared over 49,000 times. Meanwhile, Chris King now has a Facebook fanpage (although Sainsbury’s states that he has now left the company to become a primary school teacher) and the Wikipedia entry for tiger bread also now mentions the letters.

Yesterday (31 January 2012), Sainsbury’s announced that the bread will be renamed. ‘In response to overwhelming customer feedback that our tiger bread has more resemblance to a giraffe, from today we will be changing our tiger bread to giraffe bread and seeing how that goes,’ the supermarket said. It also stated that Chris King has left the company to become a primary school teacher.

Oh, and if you want to know how they get the tiger – sorry, giraffe – pattern on the bread – the surface is painted with rice paste before baking.