I bought a loaf of bread at a service station last week. The packaging described it as “artisan style.” This bread was made in a factory, sliced by a machine, sealed in plastic, and distributed to hundreds of locations across eastern Australia. The only artisan involvement was the graphic designer who chose the font.

And that’s the state of “artisan” in Australian food in 2026. The word has been so thoroughly co-opted by marketing departments that it has become the food industry’s emptiest signifier.

When everything is artisan, nothing is

Consider what the word is supposed to mean: made by a skilled craftsperson using traditional methods, typically in small batches with attention to quality over efficiency. That’s a meaningful concept. It describes a real approach to food production that produces genuinely different products.

Now consider where you’ve seen the word recently. Artisan pizza at Domino’s. Artisan sourdough at Coles. Artisan ice cream from a national chain. Artisan coffee at a franchise with 200 locations. Artisan crisps from a factory that produces 50,000 bags a day.

None of these products are artisan by any reasonable definition. They might be fine products. Some might even be good. But calling them artisan is a lie, and we’ve become so accustomed to the lie that we don’t even notice it anymore.

The damage to real artisans

The people who actually suffer from this are the genuine artisan producers. The baker who wakes up at 3am to hand-shape 80 loaves. The cheesemaker running a 20-cow operation in Gippsland. The small-batch chocolate maker roasting and grinding beans by hand.

When a supermarket chain slaps “artisan” on its factory-made bread and sells it for $4, the actual artisan baker selling a hand-made loaf for $10 has to justify a price premium for a word that customers no longer believe means anything.

I know several small food producers who’ve stopped using the word entirely because it’s been so debased. They describe their processes instead — hand-made, stone-ground, small-batch, specific technique names — because those terms still carry some meaning.

Why it works

The marketing departments aren’t stupid. “Artisan” works because consumers genuinely want what the word promises: care, craft, quality, a human connection to their food. In a food system dominated by industrial production, the desire for something made with skill and intention is real.

The problem isn’t the desire. It’s that the word has been turned into a veneer applied to industrial products to capture that desire without delivering on it.

And we fall for it because we want to. Buying “artisan” bread from the supermarket lets us feel like we’re making a quality choice without the inconvenience of seeking out an actual bakery. It’s the illusion of discernment, which is almost as satisfying as the real thing.

Almost.

The regulatory void

As I’ve written about before, Australian food labelling regulations don’t define “artisan.” There’s no legal standard, no required production method, no threshold for batch size or handwork. Any food producer can call any product artisan, and they do.

This is different from the EU, where some countries have legal protections for artisan food designations. In France, “artisan boulanger” has a legal meaning. In Australia, it’s just marketing.

FSANZ could address this. A simple standard — production scale limits, a requirement for significant hand involvement, small-batch thresholds — would restore meaning to the term. But there’s no indication this is on the regulatory agenda.

What I’d like to see

I’d like people to stop being impressed by the word “artisan” on a label and start asking what’s behind it.

Was it made by a person or a machine? In a small workshop or a factory? Does the producer know the product by name or by SKU number? Can they tell you about the ingredients, the process, the decisions they made?

Those are the questions that separate genuine craft from manufactured nostalgia.

And I’d like the genuine artisan producers to keep doing what they do, even though the word has been stolen from them. The products speak for themselves. A hand-shaped sourdough loaf and a factory “artisan style” loaf are not the same thing, and anyone who’s tasted both knows it.

Words matter in food. When we let the meaning drain out of them, we lose the ability to make informed choices. “Artisan” used to tell you something. Now it tells you nothing except that someone’s marketing budget included a thesaurus.

Let’s take it back.