Superlatives have long been part and parcel of how products are marketed in the food and drink sector — as have assertions about ingredients, health factors and provenance.
Having turned up the greenwashing heat in sectors like fashion and energy, regulators in the UK are now increasing their scrutiny of food marketing, particularly in the way products and brands are communicated across multiple channels.
That’s according to one senior lawyer who specialises in ensuring that companies remain legally compliant in their marketing, particularly in highly-competitive sectors. Katrina Anderson, principal associate at law firm Mills & Reeve, said that changes at both of the applicable UK regulators meant they were upping the ante in efforts to hold food brand owners to account.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) both largely followed the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee in determining where they focused their anti-greenwashing efforts, she said. But a change of CEO at the CMA and a desire to align more closely with the Government’s growth agenda by scrutinising non-discretionary purchases — like food — more closely were putting greater pressure on the sector.
“When it comes to environmental impact, there are the more obvious areas of the sector, like meat and dairy, that need to be very careful. But there’s very much a full lifecycle approach now, meaning the regulators will consider things like emissions from every aspect of the production and supply chain,” said Anderson. “The more processed a product is, the greater the likely risk and the complexities.
“From a communications perspective, what we’re seeing is the regulators looking much more closely beyond conventional advertising campaigns. This can be what an executive posts individually on LinkedIn about a brand, or says on X.”
Across multiple sectors, increasing greenwashing regulation has seen brands and companies move from vague generic claims about environmental credentials to more specific ones that can be backed by evidence. Yet regulatory guidelines continue to tighten, and the drive to assess content across earned, social and owned channels as well as paid advertising means that communicators will both need to be alert to everything that is being shared publicly and will need to work with the business to ensure that claims can be verified.
Food and drink brand owners, and major retailers, were the companies that had expressed most concern so far, said Katrina, while smaller firms and US-owned ones were likely at greatest risk as they tended to “push the limits”.
Anderson noted: “The new fines of up to 10% of global turnover have changed the conversation and meant that greenwashing is being raised as an issue at board level. This is especially the case for businesses that have received CMA letters or have otherwise been investigated.”
The risk of financial penalties, and of reputation damage, have not only heightened but have become more complicated, with communications now in the line of fire as well as advertising.
