If Your Name Is Isis, You’re Not Getting a Personalized Jar of Nutella

Still searching for that perfect holiday gift for someone who loves a good hazelnut spread and happens to be named Isis? You better not try to get them a personalized jar of Nutella.

Ella Redbanks of Toronto learned that the hard way when she tried to buy her six-year-old daughter Isis a jar of the delicious topping with her name on it.

Nutella is promoting a campaign called “Your Nutella, Your Way,” that allows customers to design their own custom labels. Turns out there’s one exception: people who share a name with a notorious terrorist group.

Redbanks’s daughter, who is named after a section of the River Thames often referred to as Isis, was born before the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which goes by the acronym ISIS.

But even so, sale representatives from Nutella told Redbanks that no matter what her daughter’s legal name is, the letters I-S-I-S will not be printed on one of their jars.

“It made me a little sad because my name is really important to me,” Isis told CBC News in a video where her mother is seen making a sandwich with peanut butter and jelly — not Nutella. “And people go like ‘Ew I don’t like her name…and she’s not gonna buy any of my stuff if her name is that.’”

Apparently little Isis Redbanks isn’t the only one disappointed by Nutella’s stance on Isis. A five-year-old Australian with the same first name was also told she wouldn’t be able to get the personalized jar. Nutella did not immediately return a phone call to Foreign Policy to clarify their policies.

But this name-sharing problem is not only limited to personalized jars of breakfast treats. In fact, so many institutions that shared an acronym with the Islamic State have changed their names that there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to it.

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images