Posted by kathryn in Health News and Food Labelling

GlaxoSmithKline in New Zealand have been fined $NZ227,500 ($200,000) for making misleading claims about the vitamin C content of Ribena. As I suspected , their claim that “the blackcurrants in Ribena contain four times the vitamin C of oranges” has been food label trickery. While blackcurrants themselves are indeed a rich source of vitamin C, Ribena only contains 4% of the fruit. Ribena is therefore a richer source of sugar, water and kilojoules than vitamin C.

As reported in the Herald , the action was taken by the New Zealand Commerce Commission:

Paula Rebstock, the commission’s chairwoman, said thousands of New Zealanders had been duped by the company which had specifically promoted the vitamin C-related health benefits of Ribena for children, teenagers and pregnant women.

She described the behaviour as “a massive breach of trust with the New Zealand public”.

Here in Australia, GlaxoSmithKline have issued a correction on the Ribena website :

In the past Ribena has claimed that “the blackcurrants in Ribena contain four times the vitamin C of oranges”. There is a concern that this may have misled consumers into believing that Ribena products contain four times the vitamin C of orange juice products. This is not the case. In the future Ribena will no longer be making these claims”

GSK have been caught out, but they’ve been making this claim for Ribena for decades and it’s taken two New Zealand schoolgirls to catch them out. GSK are by no means the only ones making dodgy claims on their food labels. Food manufacturers are out there to make money, they are commercial enterprises. Packaging is one of the primary marketing tools a food manufacturer uses to encourage you to buy their products. They will make strange, weird, misleading, bodgy statements if they can .

While FSANZ does regulate the food label labelling, they are under-staffed and under-resourced, which makes policing food manufacturers claims very difficult. This means it’s largely up to the consumer to check and question food labels.

Technorati tags: ribena , vitamin C , blackcurrants

Photo: Ribena juice photo by Caro Wallis under the terms of the Creative Commons license

29 March, 2007