No More Redro Fish Paste

Pecks Anchovette – and local rival Redro – are disappearing from South African shelves, and won’t be restocked anytime soon. That’s because  Pioneer Foods, the local distributor of Pecks and manufacturer of the South African equivalent Redro, has discontinued its lines of fish paste.

According to a Pioneer spokesperson, the company chose to stop making the fish paste products towards the end of last year as part an "ongoing portfolio review".

"We communicated this to our customers, stopped production and discontinued the sale of related items in December 2021," the spokesperson told Business Insider South Africa.

Although it’s still early days, the social media kickback has lacked the vigour of other product cancellations like those for Lay’s Salt and Vinegar and Nestle’s Chocolate Log, perhaps hinting to the limited popularity of the product.

However, the often-divisive anchovy-based spreads have had something of a cult following for several decades in this country. 

Pecks Anchovette, originally from the United Kingdom, dates back to 1891. It only arrived in South Africa in the 1960s, and until then, South Africans settled for Redro, a local fish spread developed from a local family recipe in the 1930s.

Redro was a leading product in the local savoury spread market for more than 30 years, aided by one of South Africa’s iconic early television commercials. In it, a young boy called Rudy speaks to a man off-camera, seemingly a reporter of some kind, about why he calls everything - including his dog and mother - Redro, because “it’s everything you love”.