Health app and nutrition brand Zoe has accused the Advertising Standards Authority of a “profound failure of logic” for its decision to uphold a ruling to ban a social media ad which claimed the Zoe Daily30+ supplement is “just real food”.
The ASA has stood firm in its decision, reiterated today after a months-long independent review process.
Professor Tim Spector, co-founder of Zoe, said the company was “stunned” the ASA was remaining resolute.
“Implicit in the ASA’s ruling is that two healthy, widely used plant-based ingredients are ultra-processed because they are ‘more than minimally processed’,” he said.
“This is a profound failure of logic that flies in the face of established nutritional science and expert opinion. To suggest that advertising a scientifically proven supplement made of whole-food ingredients is ‘misleading’ is a victory for pedantry over public health,” Spector added.
The ruling relates to a paid-for Facebook ad, which ran in late 2024, which stated Zoe’s Daily30+ supplement is a “plant-based whole food supplement” and quoted Zoe investor Steven Bartlett as saying: “This is a supplement revolution. No ultra-processed pills, no shakes, just real food.”
In its ruling in May last year, the ASA, ordering that the ad could not appear again, said at least two ingredients in the product – chicory root inulin and nutritional yeast flakes – “were not whole foods and had been through more than a minimal level of processing” and “went beyond what consumers would interpret” as minimal processing.
It warned the company not to make claims its products “did not contain UPF ingredients if consumers were likely to interpret the ingredients to be ultra-processed”.
In doing so, according to Spector, the authority has “effectively ruled that healthy, fibre-rich ingredients like chicory root inulin and nutritional yeast should be viewed through the same lens as highly processed foods like children’s cereals or snacks simply because they are professionally prepared”.
“This is an absurd, unscientific standard; by this logic, everyday staples like olive oil and flour should also be branded as ‘ultra-processed’,” he said.
In their review of the ASA’s initial findings – sighted by The Grocer – an independent reviewer argues there are “three substantial flaws” in the authority’s ruling. They say that while the ASA says the average consumer would consider any product containing any ingredient that was more than minimally processed to be a UPF, this take was “problematic” since most consumers understand the processing of food to be on a “sliding scale”. #
The reviewer also says Zoe had provided its substantiation of the claim “no ultra-processed pills”, which the ASA concluded was not adequate – but this was potentially unfair given the “subjective nature of such an assessment”. The reviewer also questioned whether the ad was “materially misleading”, questioning whether the average consumer would consider themselves misled because two of the ingredients had undergone more than minimal processing. The average consumer, they state, “is not so purist”.
Spector said it is “patronising for the ASA to claim UK consumers cannot tell the difference between health-promoting processed plants and obviously unhealthy industrially processed junk food”.
“At a time when the UK diet is dominated by harmful junk food, targeting a product that supports health is a disgraceful misuse of regulatory power,” he added.
While it has made a slight “rewording in places” in the ruling, the ASA still considers the ad to be in breach of its rules.
“The original ruling has been through an independent review process which is open to an advertiser or complainant involved in a case,” an ASA spokesman told The Grocer. “Following that process, the ASA council’s decision finding the ad in breach of the rules remains.”
Late last year, Zoe launched a crowdfunding campaign, smashing its initial target to raise more than £3m. The money raised is being used to sequence more than one million individuals’ gut microbiomes and scale in the US, which it sees as a “massive market”.
The company has a “bold ambition” to sequence one million microbiomes, having already gathered data on around 300,000. The bigger dataset, combined with Zoe’s proprietary artificial intelligence engine, known internally as GutEngine, and existing research, will allow it to “really understand the impact of individual microbes” on various health markers.
Three million people interact with Zoe each month, via the Zoe app, its podcast or Daily30+ whole food supplement, the company says. More than 70% of its revenue is from recurring subscription-based memberships.
It is not the first time Zoe has fallen foul of the advertising authority. In August 2024, the ASA ruled on a different advert for Zoe, which pictured investor Bartlett with a patch on his arm alongside a quote stating: “If you haven’t tried Zoe yet, give it a shot. It might just change your life.”
The ASA ruled the advert misleadingly omitted “material information regarding commercial relationships” and that many consumers would take The Diary of a CEO host’s quote as an independent testimonial.
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