Palm PR petition against Trading Standards

© Palm PR

Politics & Law

Plant-Based Brands Rally Behind PR Firm’s Campaign for Trading Standards to Permit Dairy-Related Terms

An initiative has been undertaken to counter the Trading Standards’ issuance of guidelines that prohibit plant-based brands from employing dairy-associated terminology such as “mylk,” “sheese,” and “b+tter”. Palm PR, a Food & Drink Public Relations agency, has spearheaded this campaign, launching a petition that endeavours to safeguard the marketing practices of vegan brands. The campaign has commenced by means of a petition hosted on change.org and has already garnered support from prominent entities such as The Vegan Society and vegan charity Viva!, along with numerous enterprises and influential figures within the field. Palm PR’s short-term aim is for the petition to prevent Trading Standards from issuing guidelines preventing plant-based brands from using dairy-related terms. In the long term, the firm hopes that the campaign will …

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Jonathan Petrides, Founder of allplants

Founder Jonathan Petrides ©allplants

Politics & Law

Experts Respond to Draft UK Guidelines That Would Ban Use of Dairy-Like Terms for Plant-Based Products

Investigative reporting from The Times and Greenpeace has revealed that new UK Trading Standard guidelines could ban the use of dairy-like terms when marketing plant-based alternatives. We spoke with the founder of industry leader allplants and the co-founder of food industry comms firm Palm PR, for a food industry perspective and public relations advice around this complicated issue. If the draft guidelines are put into force, then “obvious misspelling, homophonic words or [the] inserting [of] non-alphabet symbols” to refer to legally protected dairy terms would be prohibited. This could affect all vegan dairy products, and could see brands banned from labelling their products as “mylk”, “m*lk”, “vegan cheese”, “plant-based yoghurt”, or “cheddar-type”, along with a host of other descriptors that have historically been allowed. The …

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