Is the ASA right to ban Zoe’s ‘real food’ supplement ad?

The compound is extracted from chicory root through a process similar to sugar beet refining – the roots are crushed, soaked in hot water, filtered and purified before the fibre is spray-dried into a fine white powder. The result is commercial inulin, a widely used ingredient and one found in Zoe’s gut supplement Daily30+.

But is it ultra-processed?

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) last week upheld its decision to ban a social media ad in which the brand claimed the product – which also contains nutritional yeast, made via a process involving a centrifuge and spinning dryers – is “just real food”: a “plant-based wholefood supplement”, with “no ultra-processed pills”.

Zoe’s co-founder Professor Tim Spector has called it a “disgraceful misuse of regulatory power”.

So, did the ASA get it right? And what precedent does it set?

Few would argue that Daily30+ is bad for you. But “once isolated fibres enter a formulation, the product has moved away from being purely whole food”, says Amir Mousavi, founder of consultancy Good Food Studio.

“That does not make it unhealthy, but it does place it on a different part of the processing spectrum. That’s what the ASA is picking up on, and they’re 100% right.”

In its ruling, the ASA said consumers were likely to interpret ‘ultra-processed’ in plain terms: “products or ingredients created using complex or industrial processes not replicable in a typical domestic kitchen”.

UPF definitions

Indeed, Zoe CEO Jonathan Wolf suggested in 2023 that UPFs could be defined as containing “things you wouldn’t have in your kitchen that are therefore somehow chemically produced”.

And while Zoe argued it didn’t fit its criteria, the NOVA classification system that categorises products based on the nature and extent of industrial processing “essentially defines everything that is more than minimally processed as UPF”, says Holger Toschka, former foods R&D director at Unilever.

“So the [ASA’s] conclusion is logical,” he says, even if “the idea that the healthiness of food can be defined by level and type of processing is nonsense. As a non-scientist you might say that every treatment beyond minimal processed - however that is defined - makes food unhealthy. But that’s wrong, it’s just a belief system.”

Arguably, the ASA has misjudged consumer understanding of ultra-processed.

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The independent reviewer assigned to Zoe’s appeal said: “While I think it is certainly true that the average consumer might not be able to identify which products were potentially UPFs, I am not persuaded that they would have no understanding that this was a sliding scale.”

The ASA’s logic that, to the average consumer, ‘more than minimally processed’ equals UPF was “problematic”, the reviewer noted. The original complainant was, after all, a professor of nutrition and food science “and might not be representative of the average consumer targeted by the ad”.

Katrina Anderson of law firm Mills & Reeve says the ASA’s ”reliance on the reasonable consumer’s understanding will mean there may be uncertainty over how certain claims may be substantiated”.

The implications for the rest 

”The inherent underlying premise in the ASA’s latest republished ruling is that what consumers understand as ’UPF foods’ is food produced by an industrial process. This brings an enormous percentage of the food sector under the UPF umbrella merely by reason of not being replicable in the typical domestic kitchen,” she adds.

Spector believes regulators should be focusing on “highly processed foods like children’s cereals or snacks”.

But Mousavi says “the ASA’s instinct to scrutinise the language around ‘real food’ should not be dismissed”.

Inulin has become a powerful formulation tool that allows products to carry high fibre claims under UK labelling rules.

“In many cases it is being used to manipulate how that food performs on a nutrition label,” Mousavi says. “Nutrients become marketing signals, and the food industry quickly learns how to engineer products that maximise those signals.”

There is no suggestion this applies to Zoe, but “the ASA’s broader concern makes sense” nonetheless, Mousavi says.

“Ingredients like inulin are not problematic because they exist. They are problematic because they are frequently used to disguise the underlying quality of a product,” he says.

“The question regulators are wrestling with is not whether these ingredients are safe or beneficial in isolation. It is whether the language used to describe them accurately reflects what consumers believe they are buying.”