Mmm, shortbread! So salty, sweet, buttery and… authentic? Not in the case of “Waltz” shortbread rounds, found at my local market. I grabbed a box, amazed they were priced at only 99 cents, until I realized that this was not the famous (and heavily branded) Walker’s Shortbread of Scotland. No, this was Waltz, proudly founded in — hey! — 1980, not 1898, and manufactured in Malaysia, which is definitely not Scotland.

And yet, it looked authentic at first glance, didn’t it? They matched Walker’s packaging almost exactly, mimicking every detail from the lettering down to the tartan backdrop. Despite the fact that some finer typographic points were overlooked (like the inelegant Arial used for “Established 1980” and the mismatched small caps in “Rounds”) and that Waltz’s artwork doesn’t match the original (Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party and Dance at Bougival, I might add, have nothing to do with Scotland nor shortbread, but I guess they are both out of copyright and royalty-free), all in all, this is a pretty solid counterfeit.