May the 5th, 2022 - The much loved Croatian domacica biscuits, of all things, have been causing quite a stir of late, with debates about sexism and the singling out of women coming to the fore. Kras' popular snack has found itself in some seemingly accidental hot water.

Domacica, which if you speak Croatian, you'll know means housewife, has now been joined by words such as umjetnica (female artist), menadjerica (female manager), pravnica (female lawyer) and the list goes on. While it seems Kras' intention was to highlight how women belong in high roles just like men do, for some the opposite reaction has occurred.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, "Housewife and artist", "Housewife and programmer", "Housewife and manager", "Housewife and lawyer"…, are just some of the names of the new movement of Kras' popular Croatian Domacica biscuits.

All of this, of course, didn't manage to hit the shelves and pass people's attention without numerous reactions on social media. Many feel that there is no need for so much political correctness, and others feel like another stab at women is being taken, be it intentional or not.

"And what's wrong with being just a housewife?" one social media user asked.

"There's nothing quite as enjoyable as buying some of your unnecessarily expensive but still favourite biscuits and being greeted by political propaganda trying to teach you how to think," one Twitter user wrote.

"When a biscuit is just a ''programmer'' or ''manager'' and there is a 'domacin' (an unemployed man who takes care of the house and cooks lunch), this policy from Kras will make sense," one Twitter user wrote, as N1 reports.

"Kras made us a whole collection to understand what we can also be, alongside being housewives," another Twitter user wrote.

Still, there are others who think the Croatian Domacica biscuits campaign has hit the right mark.

"The name Domacica is well known now and they're trying to play around with words a little. They aren't creating a new brand but instead using the same name with creative ideas. It isn't ideal, but not every shift has to be the status quo. A great example for me is Dorina & cvarci, they've been sold out, there were waiting lists for them, what a great PR stunt,'' wrote one woman.

Many people were surprised because they always thought that the name Domacica merely referred to the idea of homemade biscuits themselves.

Kras also spoke up and attempted to explain the goal of this campaign, which appears to have got a little lost along the way...

"After numerous inquiries, we're now responding with some more information. The goal of our new Domacica campaign is to raise public awareness of the importance and complexity of the responsibilities that women most often take on in the household and to make them aware that caring for the household should be the common job of all household members.

With this goal, primarily in order to attract the attention of people and to open up discussion around a very important topic, we put Croatian Domacica biscuits out in a special issue on the shelves as the first step of our campaign. In addition to the inscription Domacica, we added several frequent occupations to the biscuit boxes, as far as the production process allows, to remind us that women, in addition to their work at work, are most often the ones who take care of the household on a daily basis as well. With the campaign, we want to encourage all members of society to take their share of obligations and responsibilities in the home so that the distribution of household chores is equal.

In collaboration with Ipsos, we conducted a survey in which the majority of respondents, both adult women (70 percent) and adult men (51 percent), as well as teenage girls (73 percent) and teenager boys (72 percent), claim that women do most of the work in the household. In the next phase of the campaign on social media, we'll use challenges to encourage people to take on some of the household chores and document specific activities by which they participate in the equal division of those said chores.

Part of the campaign will be educating the younger generation about their own responsibility towards household chores and the importance of the fair division of household chores among all members to encourage them to create the right habits from childhood and adopt them for the future. In agreement with the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, we're launching an initiative to change part of the definition of housewife in certain dictionaries and modernise this concept.

We believe that the public will recognise the true intention of this campaign and we're calling on everyone to get involved in raising awareness and promoting this socially important topic,'' they said from Kras.

For more, check out Made in Croatia.

Total Croatia News has already written about the appearance of a Croatian island as an example of luxury and a privileged lifestyle in an American TV show. Now numerous Croatian products have been spotted in a different TV show, probably even more popular as it's final season has recently started streaming: Orange Is the New Black.

OK, fair enough, some of the people working for TCN maybe spend too much time watching Netflix. But, when you're watching the final episodes of one of your favourite TV shows of the recent past and something catches your eye in the background, you really need to pause, rewind 10 seconds just to make sure you're seeing it correctly. And I was. (For those not familiar with the show, it follows a group of women in an American federal prison, telling the story of their life in prison, but also the stories of how they ended up there. One of the characters, nicknamed Red, is a Russian lady who works on a Russian market in Queens, where the usual market stuff is happening along with organised crime)

It was Jadro Napolitanke that caught my attention first. Then it was Domaćica, and then I paused and tried to find as many familiar products as possible. And there are a lot, if you grew up in Croatia (or former Yugoslavia) you can probably count over a dozen familiar products on the shelf, including pickles, canned beef, some favourite sweets etc. The set designers for the show have worked hard to get their hands on numerous ex-Yu products (mostly Croatian, though) - hopefully, that's what they wanted their imaginary Russian market to have on its shelves. 

One thing has to be mentioned if we want to be fair: the products on the shelves are in their current, modern packaging. The scenes where they are visible take place in the past, before Red got into prison, probably sometime in the nineties. The designs of most of the products (and they all existed then!) were significantly different back then. Maybe that just goes to show that the contemporary product design of Croatian products is not really as contemporary as we'd like to think it is if it fits perfectly as a background in a scene taking place decades ago!

Which products can you see that aren't listed in the article?