The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has on Wednesday upheld a complaint against food supplement company Zoe over a Facebook ad promoting its plant-based product, Daily30+, ruling that it misled consumers about its processing credentials.
The Facebook ad, seen in September 2024, described the supplement as “just real food” and claimed “no ultra-processed pills, no shakes”, positioning it as a cleaner alternative to conventional supplements. The complainant, a professor of nutrition and food science, challenged whether the ad wrongly implied the product contained no ultra-processed ingredients.
Zoe defended its ad, stating that while Daily30+ was not completely free of processing, it did not meet accepted definitions of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), such as the NOVA classification or criteria outlined in a report last year by the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee. The company argued that its product was composed of 32 whole food ingredients, including vegetables, fruits, seeds and mushrooms, and did not include artificial additives, sweeteners or preservatives.
The ASA, however, ruled that consumers would interpret claims like “just real food” and “no ultra-processed pills” as meaning the product contained only minimally processed ingredients. Although the product as a whole might not meet the technical definition of a UPF, two specific ingredients – chicory root inulin and nutritional yeast flakes – had undergone industrial processing, including filtration, enzymatic hydrolysis and other extraction methods.
The regulator said that while the NOVA system evaluates foods as a whole rather than by individual ingredients, consumer understanding of UPFs is generally unsophisticated and often equates “ultra-processed” with “unhealthy.” As a result, the ASA concluded that the Zoe ad was likely to mislead.
The ruling cited breaches of the CAP Code rules 3.1 (misleading advertising) and 3.7 (substantiation). Zoe has been instructed not to run the ad in its current form and to avoid making claims that their products are free from UPFs if consumers are likely to believe otherwise based on the processing of individual ingredients.
