What was claimed
Toby Carvery is giving away a free carvery for two to people who like and comment on a Facebook post.
Our verdict
False. This is not a genuine offer from Toby Carvery.
Toby Carvery CEO isn’t giving away free meals to people who comment on Facebook posts
Posts shared on Facebook falsely claim the restaurant Toby Carvery is giving a free meal to everyone who likes the post and comments “Roast”.
The posts claim to be written by “Robert Daniels, CEO of Toby Carvery”, and say: “We're turning 50! To thank you for being part of our journey, a complimentary carvery for two will be given to everyone who hits like and says: Roast”.
But a spokesperson for Toby Carvery’s parent company, Mitchells & Butlers, confirmed to Full Fact that these posts are not genuine offers, and said official Toby Carvery deals will only appear on the brand’s social media channels.
Moreover, the included photo is not of the “CEO of Toby Carvery”—it does not show Phil Urban, the chief executive of Mitchells & Butlers. We weren’t able to find an original version of the image of a man used in this post, but it doesn’t appear to be a genuine employee of the company—the label on his tie reads “Tory Carvery”. When we searched this image using Google’s reverse image search tool and selected ‘about this image’, a note said it was “made with Google AI”, meaning it was generated or modified with Google’s AI tools.
The first Toby Carvery also opened in 1985, making the brand 40 years old, not 50 as the posts claim.
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A similar post from earlier this year claims to be written instead by “Sue Golbridge a managing director at Toby Carvery”, but we couldn’t find evidence someone with this name holds this position at the company. The image used in this post was taken in 2017, at the opening of the refurbished Wolviston Toby Carvery in Billingham.
Posts offering fake deals are very common on Facebook. We’ve fact checked other posts claiming to offer Toby Carvery deals, as well as a number of offers supposedly tied to other retailers like John Lewis, Argos, Amazon, Boots, and Morrisons, none of which had anything to do with the named companies.
It is always worth checking posts sharing offers that seem too good to be true. One way to verify this is to see whether the offer has been shared by the company’s official page—this will often have more followers, a verified blue tick on platforms like Facebook or Instagram and a longer post history.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this is not a genuine offer from Toby Carvery.