Last month Kellogg’s was in hot water with the advertising watchdog over calorie claims relating to its Special K cereal. Its boast that a bowl of the stuff was only 114 calories didn’t include milk, prompting the company to argue, with some justification, that plenty of people don’t put milk on their cereal anyway.
Weetabix was in similar bother today, albeit from the opposite end of the argument. The ASA ruled that the claim of its flagship brand to be packed with ‘Slow Release Energy’ was misleading, due to the relatively high glycaemic index (GI) of the biscuits when consumed in isolation.
However, when served with semi-skimmed or whole milk, Weetabix does indeed fall into the category of what the British Nutrition Foundation regards as low GI (and therefore raises blood glucose slowly).
In its response to the ASA, Weetabix pointed to a trio of studies showing that between 96% and 98% of people eating Weetabix did so with milk.
But that wasn’t enough to convince the watchdog, which decided that the ad’s closing shot of a box on its own implied you’d get the same slow-release benefits by chomping them up in your fist. (You do wonder a bit about the 2% of people who apparently do exactly that.)
Either way, there’s more controversy over milk afoot in the new section of thegrocer.co.uk dedicated to the dairy protests, as another processor today caved in to pressure and cancelled a proposed price cut.
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