“Nothing short of disgraceful.” The co-founder of nutrition brand Zoe, Professor Tim Spector, pulled no punches last week when the Advertising Standards Authority handed down its judgment that a social media ad claiming Zoe’s Daily30+ supplement was “just real food” was misleading.
Spector bristled that the ruling “only adds to the confusion in a food system already plagued by misleading information”, and that it “risks misleading the public”.
His colleague Jonathan Wolf, CEO and co-founder of Zoe, came out swinging, writing an op-ed for The Grocer that argued the ruling was “not merely a bureaucratic misstep” but “a blow to common sense around healthy food and food innovation”. Steven Bartlett – whose Flight Fund invested £2.1m in Zoe in 2023 – joined the pile-on too, with a LinkedIn slide-show that explained he was “really, really confused”. The authority “has lost its way” he said.
But doth the svelte, healthy gutted, sound-sleeping, mood-boosted lady protest too much? For Zoe, the ASA ruling is far more damaging than simply not being able to re-run a Facebook ad from last year – it threatens the entire perception of the brand.
UPFs are bad, ‘real food’ is good
If there’s a key takeaway from Zoe’s years’ worth of voluminous content – in the form of countless blog posts, op-eds, guides, social media posts and podcasts – it’s that UPFs are bad.
“This epidemic of ultra-processed food,” Spector said in a 2023 brand podcast, “is killing us”. In the same show, Wolf simplified UPFs for listeners: “fundamentally – does it contain things you wouldn’t have in your kitchen that are therefore somehow chemically produced in order to achieve something for the properties of the food?”
How to spot a UPF? “The ingredient list will be large. It will contain many things that you wouldn’t have in the kitchen and that you shouldn’t need in real food,” Spector once told a conference audience. “If it’s got lots of packaging and health claims [such as] extra vitamins, high in protein, low in fats, no added sugar, then 99% of the time it is UPF.”
Such advice makes accepting the brand’s fermented milk drink M&S x Zoe Gut Shot and its Daily30+ Wholefood Supplement tricky, with more than a little in the way of mental gymnastics required to swallow the ‘real food’ story.
The gut shot contains ingredients such as baobab pulp and chicory fibre. The supplement contains chicory root inulin and nutritional yeast flakes – the inclusion of which sat at the centre of the ASA’s objections to advertising Daily30+ as “just real food”. The extraction process for chicory root inulin, for example, is a highly industrial one, requiring slicing and steeping, purification using carbonated water as well as evaporation, partial enzymatic hydrolysis and filtration.
These are hardly things you can rustle up at home.
“I’m impressed that Tim can make nutritional yeast extract and extract chicory root fibre in his own kitchen. Obviously got some serious kit in there,” development chef and writer Anthony Warner told The Grocer.
Highly processed health
There is good reason for the inclusion of those ingredients, though. As Spector told The Grocer: “Chicory root inulin is high in fibre, backed by health claims from the EFSA and FSA and is a well-researched, well-understood ingredient added to improve the nutritional profile of many foods and used in clinical practice.
”Nutritional yeast is a nutrient-dense powerhouse, full of B-vitamins, minerals and protein and used as a culinary ingredient recommended to improve dietary intakes of micronutrients and healthy protein.”
But that doesn’t get away from the fact they are highly processed. Zoe appears all too aware of the leap it is expecting customers to make as it on the one hand damns over-processed ingredients, while selling them with the other.
More recent blog posts have revealed that “as scientists explore further, they have discovered that not all UPFs are equal”. In March, Zoe launched its Processed Food Risk Scale – to hammer home that “not all UPFs are equally detrimental to health” and counter the “scaremongering” around UPFs. Scaremongering in which it undoubtedly played more than a bit-part.
It must be aware its (until only recently) “UPFs = bad” message had landed with its customers, otherwise why use the phrase “no ultra-processed pills, no shakes, just real food” in an advert to begin with?
In its defence, Zoe argued that the Daily30+ product did not meet the definition of UPFs as per food classification system Nova. But no ordinary consumer would be aware of that complex system. And by calling it a “whole food supplement”, the ASA determined, most consumers “would expect that the ingredients used in the product were all very close to their unprocessed form, and therefore those ingredients and the product as a whole were not UPFs”.
Selling the UPF narrative
The ruling clearly hurts Zoe. The decision closely associates its products – which few would argue aren’t beneficial to people’s health – in with chocolate bars and chicken dippers.
“It is clear that a lot of the Zoe customer base is sold on the UPF narrative – in part because the Zoe team have been talking about it repeatedly – so when their products are lumped in with other UPFs, it is incredibly damaging for their brand,” says Warner.
Spector and co have quickly pivoted their argument away from whether any of Daily30+’s ingredient are ultra-processed (they are) towards the fact the product is, overall, a positive for health. They’re now arguing that the “food landscape and regulatory system has been captured by large CPG companies pushing highly processed ‘food’ that they know causes harm”, that the ASA should instead be scrutinising the “self-interested lobbying of companies selling junk” and “the harmful marketing and advertising of unhealthy junk food to children and vulnerable individuals”.
The ASA should and is doing that, of course. But that doesn’t mean firms selling healthier foods should be free to mislead. If anything, the ‘scientifically backed’ and ‘research-based’ brand should be welcoming the scrutiny. The ASA – which is limited in how it can reply to the pile-on – soberly considered a complaint and responded reasonably, in the interests of the everyday consumer.
“If Zoe had been adamant that the UPF classification system was limited or flawed from the start, I would have some sympathy, but they haven’t,” Warner says. “They are happy to classify other people’s food as high risk in their seemingly arbitrary Zoe classification system, including things like wholemeal bread.
”That’s completely disingenuous when you are selling ‘gut shots’ and bags of magic seeds for £100 a kg, with ingredients no normal human could make in a kitchen, and presenting them as alternatives to affordable healthy options.
“They are learning that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword and it’s a painful lesson.”
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