They have had some early success with the European Court of Justice ruling the words milk, whey, cream, buttermilk, cheese and yoghurt could be used for only animal-based products.
Last week’s court ruling banned plant-based products like soya and tofu from being promoted in Europe using terms normally associated with dairy, upholding regulations that reserved those terms exclusively for products “produced by normal mammary excretion”.
A group representing the European processed meat industry has been lobbying the European Commission to ban vegetarian or vegan products being referred to as meat, vegetarian meat, meat substitute, vegetarian minced meat, vegetarian meatballs or deliberate misspelling such as chiken.
Dairy Companies Association of NZ chief executive Kimberly Crewther said her organisation shared the concern of other global dairy organisations about creep in the use of milk terminology to label or describe non-milk products.
“This issue specifically arises where other products not only use milk or dairy terms but are also marketed as providing a dietary equivalent or substitute to milk or dairy products.”
In doing so non-milk products were trading on the association of dairy milk and its natural, nutrient-dense source of nutrition.
Crewther said the association supported the Codex principles for food labelling that set standards, guidelines and principles on the use of dairy terms, helping consumers make decisions and supported the predictability of food composition.
“Codex defines milk as being produced by mammals.
“It also defines a range of associated dairy terms such as skim milk, butter and casein to ensure consistency of composition. For example, you could not use the term butter for a product labelled as fat-free because butter by its nature is made from dairy fat.”
Those standards, which applied in NZ, allowed exceptions where it was clear use described a characteristic of a non-milk product such as peanut butter, coconut milk, cocoa butter or soy milk.
Asked if the dairy industry would take legal action to prevent plant-based alternatives using traditional dairy terms, Crewther said given growing international demand for pasture-based dairy cow products, the strategy was to raise consumer awareness of its nutritional value.
Beef + Lamb NZ chief executive Sam McIvor said his organisation took an approach of not wanting consumers to be misled.
“We don't want to leave open the possibility of consumer confusion so would expect that all the fair trading rules about misleading consumers etc, were applied.”
The Farmers Weekly in Britain reported the European Court of Justice ruling was the result of a case taken by German competition association Verband Sozialer Wettbewerb (VSW) against TofuTown, a producer and distributor of vegetarian and vegan food products in Germany.
VSW claimed TofuTown used dairy terms such as Soyatoo tofu butter, plant cheese, veggie cheese and cream on purely plant-based products in contravention of competition rules.
Te Puke sharemilker and Nuffield scholar Richard Fowler, who studied the growth of synthetic food, said while the court victory would be welcomed it ignored the bigger picture.
“Ultimately we have got to focus on the product itself, why people are buying these synthetic foods over animal products.”
Conventional farming has to also defend itself better from some questionable claims and accusations levelled by synthetic food manufacturers.
“What I found was that there was a lot of generalised stuff in the marketing of these synthetic foods about what farming has done.
“They didn’t differentiate between farming systems, which I found frustrating coming from NZ’s pasture-based system compared to the United States feedlot systems.”
Fowler said he attended the New Harvest conference in the US, a group representing the cellular agriculture industry.
Of the 300 attendees he was one of just three farmers and was disturbed at the absence of scienctific evidence used to question conventional agriculture.
“I think we’ve just got to get the message out there that agriculture is not ending, that it is not coming to the end of the world.”
The European Vegetarian Union (EVU) claimed the court decision was a literal interpretation of the law that had nothing to do with consumer protection but was driven by economic concerns.
It said plant-based products had been developed “specifically to resemble the originals, they should be allowed to be marketed under similar sales denominations.
“It is the EVU’s position that milky names on plant-based milk alternatives convey important information on what consumers can expect from a product.”
