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Shoppers prefer 'vegan' food labels to 'confusing' plant-based terms, according to new survey
(www.veganfoodandliving.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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Vegan
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To be fair I was told by a dietician that a lot of companies don’t use the vegan logo in the uk because in order to do so they must be certified by the vegan society (name?) which is expensive.
Sounded a bit like a troll toll.
There should be an industry standard “vegan friendly” or other such label that doesn’t require giving loads of money to an organisation to use.
The Vegan Society does do certifications for products which will let you use their logo. I'm not aware of any laws which would stop you from calling a product vegan without that certification, just can't use their logo for it.
I can't remember if it was the EU or ISO which was working on a standard to classify a product as vegan in the past couple of years. Though the last news I heard about it was that it was being led by agricultural lobby rather than animal rights activists.
I'm not sure wether that logo is really as expensive as they claim, but there are tons of products out there with kind of selfmade logos or at least a little text which reads "vegan", "vegan friendly" or "suitable for a vegan diet". Of course the official logo is the safe one, but as it's still illegal to make misleading claims I guess one can trust 99% of those labels.
I've got no idea how much the Vegan Society (or other orgs) charges for certification. As you said, plenty of other labels/logos they can use.
I do occasionally see reports of companies labeling a product as vegan when it isn't. Usually from someone not understanding what vegan means (like honey). But those are pretty rare in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how good a case someone would have for misleading claims without any legal definition on what "Vegan" means.
IANAL, but usually if there's no existing legal definition, courts first look to the word's usual and ordinary meaning, which is to say, basically the dictionary definition. So even if they went with that definition over the Vegan Society's, it would at the very least contain no parts of animals, or secretions thereof.