Posted February 2, 2016
A federal judge ruled last Friday that New York-based yogurt maker Chobani must cease running ads claiming Dannon’s light Greek yogurt contains chlorine and is not safe to eat.
According to the New York Post, Dannon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Chobani after it launched ads attacking Dannon Light and Fit. The ads claim Chobani Simply 100 is the only 100-calorie Greek yogurt with zero preservatives.
One of the Chobani commercials is described as showing a young woman lounging by a pool chair and reaching for a cup of Dannon yogurt. A voiceover states, “Dannon Light & Fit Greek actually uses artificial sweeteners like sucralose. Sucralose? Why? That stuff has chlorine added to it!” The voiceover concludes, “Now, there’s Chobani Simply 100. It’s the only 100-calorie light yogurt sweetened naturally.”
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge David Hurd concluded that Chobani “is free to continue to spread its message about the value of selecting natural ingredients,” but may not disseminate false messages, including that Dannon’s or General Mills’s products are unsafe because they contain the sweetener sucralose and the preservative potassium sorbate, according to website mediapost.com.
Sucralose and potassium sorbate are generally recognized as safe by U.S. food regulators. Judge Hurd also wrote that “the balance of record evidence reflects that sucralose is an unusually well-studied compound repeatedly determined to be safe for ordinary consumption.”
Per mediapost.com, Hurd reasoned that courts “regularly recognize that even where ‘no combination of words’ found in the advertisement is untrue, the message conveyed by the advertisement may still be ‘literally false’ if its clear meaning, considered in context, is false.”
Chobani, for its part, sued Dannon in US District Court in Albany over the attempt to block its advertising. Chobani Chief Marketing and Brand Officer Peter McGuinness told AdAge, “This is not a marketing campaign, it’s a mindset campaign, and it outlines the difference between using only natural ingredients versus artificial ingredients.”
Chobani later declared via twitter, “The conversation about how food is made in our country is just beginning.”
More information and clips of the ads are available here.
(Photo courtesy pixabay.com)