At a time when the UK faces a dire public health crisis, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has taken aim at the wrong target. Rather than scrutinising the countless high-risk processed foods dominating our shelves, it has chosen to censor Zoe – a company founded on science and integrity – for daring to call a whole food supplement “real food”.
Our food landscape and regulatory system has been captured by large CPG companies pushing highly processed “food” that they know causes harm. This is exactly what happened with tobacco companies. Eventually, science won, smoking rates plummeted and life expectancies soared.
We can achieve the same with food if we push back against the self-interested lobbying of companies selling junk that masquerades as healthy food. Supermarkets have the power to be catalysts for change in this process, by supporting our push to easily identify high-risk processed food and stop the outrageous health claims on their packaging.
Whole food ingredients
Let’s be clear: our Daily30+ whole food supplement is not a pill, a shake, or a synthetic cocktail of isolated nutrients. It is made from real and whole food ingredients – over 30 of them – designed with the most robust science to help people eat the variety of fibre-rich plants we know is key to a healthy gut and long-term health. Daily30+ has a patent pending and a randomised controlled trial in 399 people to validate its efficacy.
The ASA’s ruling focuses not on this robust evidence but on two specific ingredients: chicory root inulin and nutritional yeast flakes. The regulator claims these ingredients have been processed too much to count as real food in the mind of the average consumer, who may be left “confused”. Never mind that chicory inulin is recognised by the European Food Safety Authority for its prebiotic benefits, nor that nutritional yeast is a staple of nutritious, plant-based diets.
Even more bewildering is the ASA’s decision to ignore Nova. Despite its weaknesses, it is so far the only internationally recognised scientific classification system to categorise foods by their degree of processing. By Nova standards, Daily30+ is not an ultra-processed food. The ASA admits this.
And yet, the regulator has chosen to substitute scientific rigour with a vague notion of “consumer perception”, without offering evidence that consumers would indeed see such ingredients as harmful or confusing. To make matters more absurd, this entire ruling was triggered by one single complaint.
Dangerous messages
This is not merely a bureaucratic misstep – it is a blow to common sense around healthy food and food innovation. It sends a dangerous message that any form of processing is bad and all processed foods are equally bad. It’s exactly what the worst actors in food want.
It’s laughable that products seeking to improve our health with real, whole ingredients are told to stay in their lane, while the real offenders contributing to rising diet-related chronic disease continue unchecked with outrageous health claims.
If the ASA is truly interested in consumer protection, then it must hold fast to science, not assumptions. Because what is truly misleading is their suggesting that a product with 5g of fibre per serving, no harmful additives, rich in omega-3 ALAs and bioactive compounds from over 30 plants, is akin to junk food. We would be delighted to work with the ASA and other regulatory bodies to update food advertising standards for the science of 2025, not 1975.
To the many other pioneering food brands out there working to change our food landscape for the better: this is a call to arms. We must not let institutional inertia stifle progress. Together, we must push for definitions and standards that reflect the best of what food can be, not the worst of what it has become. And we call on the supermarkets who feed this country to join us in this mission to improve the health of millions.
Real food created for good health should be the solution to our health crisis, not a victim of short-sighted bureaucracy and cynical lobbying.
Jonathan Wolf is the CEO and co-founder of Zoe
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