Company pushes for Camembert emoji

By Jim Cornall

- Last updated on GMT

A thumbs up for a Camembert emoji?
A thumbs up for a Camembert emoji?

Related tags Cheese Food France

While they may cause confusion and disdain among an older generation of smartphone users, the youngest users of WhatsApp and a myriad other communication tools can’t seem to get enough emojis, the tiny picture characters that can be inserted into text or messages.

Currently, the dairy industry is represented – emoji-wise – by a glass of milk, a rather generic wedge of cheese, an ice-cream, a bottle of infant formula, and a cow.

Now, a cheese manufacturer in France is looking to get a Camembert emoji approved through a petition that has so far attracted more than 1,100 signatures.

And while online petitions aren’t the usual way of gaining the momentum to have a new emoji added to the existing range, that hasn’t stopped Fromagerie Gillot, from posting a petition on change.org​ to have Camembert adopted as an official emoji.

Tough road ahead?

However, emojis are tightly controlled in that companies and individuals can’t just create one and have it placed into emoji keyboards around the world, even though creating specific emojis is easily done.

Also, emojis vary from keyboard to keyboard, so creating and implementing emojis isn’t straightforward.

Emojis are controlled by the Unicode Consortium, making addition of new emojis a little complicated, preventing all kinds of corporate branding, offensive emojis and sports team logos, for example.  And the more a new emoji is predicted to be used, the better its chances of being in the next batch of emojis being introduced.

No word yet whether there will be a similar push for Edam, feta and Swiss cheese emojis, or perhaps even an entire dairy emoji keyboard with cottage cheese, butter, yogurt and milk powder added to the mix.

Related topics Retail & Shopper Insights Cheese