While the dog snack is made from bull penises, it was previously tagged with a fig-leaf label identifying the product as "bull nerves".
Migros spokeswoman Martina Bosshard told AFP that the retailer faced negative feedback from customers when it switched to the franker, and more accurate, label.
Confirming a report in Swiss daily 20 minutes, Bosshard said Migros decided to go back to the less explicit labelling, despite the fact that "no one returned" products with the bull penises label.
The "Max" brand chews, which feature a cute beagle on the packet, are popular among dog owners in Switzerland.
The packets pitch the snacks as "100-percent natural" and a "treat to chew on with pleasure for a long time".
As with other products in multilingual Switzerland, all the wording on the packets is in German, French and Italian.
In what may have been a nod to different cultural norms between the three language regions, the chews' "beef nerves" name remained unchanged in German, which is spoken by a majority of Swiss.
The penis label, however, was used in French and Italian.
Bosshard said that the penis-branded packets would not be withdrawn, but that stocks would run out naturally by December, while all new chews would be produced under a "nerves" label.
"It's not the product that's changed, but just the packaging, at the end of the day," she said.
MIGROS
Migros backs off ‘bull’s penis’ dog chew labels
Swiss supermarket chain Migros has backtracked on a decision to stick a no-nonsense "bull's penis" label on a brand of dog chews, it said on Tuesday.
MIGROS
Swiss retail giant Migros slashes prices on 600 products
Faced with the competition from Aldi and Lidl, Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain is now cutting prices by at least 10 percent on several hundred products.
Three-quarters of the discounted items are from the food sector and the rest are other consumer items.
Their prices will be reduced before the end of the year.
“The new price discounts should convince people to think of Migros when they are planning their purchases”, the company spokesperson told Swiss media outlet 20 Minuten.
Migros, which has over 1,000 stores in Switzerland, owns not just grocery shops, but also sports, electronics, and hardware stores, as well as a bank and adult education centres.
The behavioural economist Tilman Slembeck from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences said Migros is “under pressure to act” in order to compete with cheaper supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl.
“There is constant pressure from the discounters”, he said.
READ MORE: Switzerland ‘the most expensive in Europe’ for bread and meat
In the end, consumers might be the winners in the price war.
For instance, red peppers now cost 3.30 francs per kilo instead of 3.80, the price of M-Classic butter waffles went down from 2.70 francs to 2.20, and the six-pack of 1.5-litre bottles of Aproz mineral water are 2.85 instead of 5.70.
You can see other price reductions here.
The range of cheaper M-Budget products, aimed at those with low incomes, is being extended. But its price will not be lowered as it is already at hard-discount level.
Food and many other products sold in Switzerland are more expensive than comparable goods in the EU.
A recent study from Eurostat database shows that there’s nowhere on the continent where bread is more expensive than in Switzerland, where its cost is 1.64 times higher than the European average.
Milk, cheese and eggs cost around 1.4 times more than they do elsewhere in Europe.
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