Every protected place name in Britain is something you eat

Melton Mowbray pork pies, Made in Sheffield, Harris Tweed, West Country farmhouse Cheddar. They read like four examples of the same idea: a place name that a product has to earn. They are not. One is enforced by statute, one is a licence you buy for £200, one required its own Act of Parliament, and one is a carefully worded survivor of a name that got away.

Nothing on a shelf tells a shopper which is which. Since grading provenance claims is most of what we do here, the differences are worth setting out, and the first one is bigger than we expected.

The statutory register, and what is not on it

The UK runs one scheme that gives legal force to a geographical name on food and drink. It has four registers, and as of today it protects 99 names of UK origin:

Ninety-nine is not many. Of those, 86 are inherited: they were already protected before 2021 under the EU scheme and carried across. In the five years since, the UK has added eleven names of its own, most of them Welsh, the newest being Pembrokeshire Native Oysters, Pembrokeshire Rock Oysters, Welsh Heather Honey and Dovey Native Botanical Gin.

Now read down the register looking for something you could put on a shelf and keep. There is nothing. Every one of the 99 is a food, a drink, or an agricultural product. The closest thing to a manufactured good is Native Shetland Wool, and that is the fleece rather than anything woven from it.

This is not an accident of what people happened to apply for. The scheme has no provision for anything else: the government’s own guidance scopes it to “food, drink and agricultural products”. So Sheffield cutlery, Stoke pottery, Kidderminster carpet and Northampton footwear are not unregistered. They are unregistrable. Every one of those is a genuine, measurable concentration of a named trade in a named place, as we found when we counted them on the company register, and not one of them has any statutory route to protect its name.

So what is “Made in Sheffield”?

It is a licence, and the terms are published.

Made in Sheffield is administered as a registered mark, which the scheme states is held under British Design Application No. 3021457. To use it a company must be in the Sheffield postcode area, apply to the Made In Sheffield Mark Committee, which meets every two months, and pay £200 for a two-year licence. The test the committee applies is not a geographical formula like a PDO’s. It is the Trading Descriptions Act 1968, under which the goods must have undergone a treatment or process resulting in a substantial change. The scheme gives the worked example that painting or repackaging does not qualify, while making a garment from imported cloth does.

We have no criticism of this whatsoever, and it is worth saying why the comparison is not a gotcha. A chamber of commerce cannot legislate. Faced with no statutory scheme, a licensed mark with a published test and a committee that meets six times a year is close to the strongest instrument actually available, and the substantial-change test is a real test that real applications fail.

It is also, almost exactly, the question this site has to answer several hundred thousand times. Our make tier distinguishes made_here from assembled_here on the same axis, and when we had to decide whether printing counts as making, we landed in the same place by the same reasoning: printing a greetings card in Nottingham is making a card, because there is no meaningful article before the ink, while printing a design on a hoody made abroad is decorating it. Sheffield’s committee would recognise that distinction immediately. It is their Section 36 test with a different substrate.

The difference is what stands behind the two. A PDO is enforced by the state against anyone. A licensed mark binds its licensees and relies on trade mark law against everyone else.

Harris Tweed had to get its own Act of Parliament

There is one manufactured British good with statutory protection of its name, and the route it took shows exactly how absent the general scheme is.

Harris Tweed is defined in primary legislation. The Harris Tweed Act 1993 is an Act of Parliament whose stated purpose includes “the definition of Harris Tweed” and “preventing the sale as Harris Tweed of material which does not fall within the definition”. It establishes the Harris Tweed Authority as a statutory body. Section 7 defines the cloth as tweed “handwoven by the islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides, finished in the Outer Hebrides, and made from pure virgin wool dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides”.

Read that as a specification and it is stricter than most PDOs: dyeing, spinning, weaving and finishing all tied to the islands, and the weaving tied to the weaver’s own home. The Orb certification mark that goes on the cloth dates from 1909, decades before any geographical indication scheme existed anywhere.

A single industry obtained an Act of Parliament because there was no register to join. That is the cost of the gap, and Harris Tweed is the only British fabric that has paid it.

Since April 2025, Northern Ireland has the scheme Great Britain does not

This is the part we did not expect to find.

In October 2023 the EU adopted Regulation (EU) 2023/2411, which extends geographical indication protection to craft and industrial products, naming textiles, ceramics, glass, jewellery and cutlery among them. It is the scheme that would cover Sheffield cutlery and Stoke ceramics if it applied here.

It partly does. The regulation was added to the Windsor Framework by a Joint Committee decision on 29 April 2025 and applies in Northern Ireland. An applicability motion had been debated at the Northern Ireland Assembly on 19 March 2024 and was not agreed with cross-community support; the Joint Committee decision followed regardless.

The consequence, as the law now stands, is that a craft or industrial product made in Northern Ireland has a route to a registered geographical indication for its name, and the same product made in Sheffield, Stoke or Kidderminster does not. We list makers in Draperstown, Newtownards and Comber on identical terms to makers in Sheffield, which is settled site policy, and this is the first thing we have found where the terms genuinely are not identical.

We are describing a regulation, not predicting its use. We have no evidence that any Northern Irish craft producer has yet registered anything under it, and we have not looked for a UK consultation on extending the scheme to Great Britain.

Cheddar is the one that got away

The register is also a record of what was lost, and the most famous example is the one most people would name first.

“Cheddar” is not protected. It is a generic term, made worldwide, and no place name claim attaches to it. What is protected is West Country farmhouse Cheddar cheese, a PDO, which is a different and much narrower name. Every word in it is doing work, which is why it reads so awkwardly on a label.

Stilton shows the opposite outcome. It appears on the register twice, as Stilton Blue Cheese and Stilton White Cheese, two separate PDOs for what most people would call one cheese.

What we can and cannot tell you about our own catalogue

We hold 1,097,670 products, and we do not record whether any of them carries a protected designation. There is no field for it, and this article is the first time we have had the register as data.

We can point at two we are confident about, because the maker states the protected name on the product itself: Brockleby’s Pies list a Melton Mowbray Pork Pie, and Sea Sisters list Cornish Sardines. Both names are PGIs.

We could not responsibly give you a longer list yet, and the reason is a useful warning about this kind of matching. Searching product titles for the 99 protected names returns plenty of hits that mean nothing: the PDO wine names “English” and “Sussex” match thousands of unrelated products, a Cornish pasty enamel badge matches Cornish Pasty, and a rhubarb preserve matches Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb without being it. A protected name on a label can mean the product is the thing, contains the thing, or merely mentions it, and only the first is a provenance claim. Doing this properly means checking the maker against the register rather than the words against the title, which is work we have not done.

So: a gap, stated as one. It is now on our list.

Sources

The register figures are from the UK protected geographical food and drink names register, fetched as data from the GOV.UK search API on 30 September 2026, filtered to names with country of origin United Kingdom and status registered, and committed to our repository as data/gi-register.json so the counts above can be checked against the day they were taken. Scheme scope and definitions are from the government’s UK GI schemes guidance.

Made in Sheffield’s criteria, committee and fee are as published by the scheme at madeinsheffield.org, and the registration number is as stated there. The Harris Tweed definition is quoted from the Harris Tweed Act 1993. The craft GI regulation is Regulation (EU) 2023/2411, and its Windsor Framework status is from the Northern Ireland Assembly’s EU law scrutiny tracker.

None of the above is legal advice, and a maker deciding what to put on a label should read the schemes themselves rather than us.