Tony The Tiger Found Toothless — Kellogg's Loses Legal Challenge

A few months ago, Kellogg’s launched a legal challenge against the Government, regarding new regulations that limit how unhealthy food and drinks can be promoted in shops.

As part of their legal case, Kellogg’s challenged the system used to assess whether products are classed as ‘less healthy’ and therefore included in the new rules that would stop them using promotional tactics to keep them in the spotlight in shops. They claimed cereals should always be assessed with added milk, which makes them healthier. If accepted, their claim would have allowed the big food brand to continue promoting cereals with high levels of sugar — like Krave chocolate cereal, which has over 25% sugar as its ingredient.

The notion that a sugary food becomes healthier when you add something else to it was absolutely ridiculous and led to us launching our #JustAddMilk campaign on Twitter. We tagged Kellogg’s and asked them if any of the unhealthy food we added milk to had suddenly become healthier. Confoundingly they never replied!

Thankfully the judge agreed with us, calling Kellogg’s assertion that adding milk somehow made unhealthy products healthier “surprising” (that’s lawyer speak for rubbish) and all the legal challenges were rejected. Child health won!

It’s great that the judge has seen through Kellogg’s pathetic attempt to derail vital children’s health policies in order to enable them to make vast profits, by keeping their sugary products centre stage. Perhaps rather than pumping their billions of pounds worth of profits into undermining children’s health, they should have a good long look at the huge number of sugary foods they’re selling, and instead invest in putting healthier foods in the spotlight.

Kellogg’s have been repeatedly called out for their manipulative practices and their failure to protect child health, including by our #DontHideWhatsInside campaign. This highlights the misleading health claims on their packaging, which lure young people into thinking the products are healthier than they are. Despite repeated attempts to engage with Kellogg’s, they wouldn’t budge and so we decided to go a step further. We created our own new healthy snackbar — müd. Müd is high in fibre, a great source of minerals and low in fat. All of these statements are true — we didn’t lie — but müd was in fact just….mud!

Last Wednesday we designated Kellogg’s the sole winner of a year’s worth of müd, and delivered it to them. Watch our video to find out how it all went down. Despite their loss in court, and our attention grabbing public stunt, they still have not reached out to engage with us. It’s clear businesses like Kellogg’s will not change their manipulative practices on their own. We need the Government to step up.