How many times have you unwrapped or opened a product, and have been irritated by the fact that it doesn’t look nearly as good as the image on the box or wrapping?
When that happened to Derek Allan-Barrett with a Tex chocolate bar, he was sufficiently annoyed to go to the trouble of lodging a complaint of misleading packaging with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
“Rich creamy Nestle milk chocolate with Aero centre and filled biscuit wafers” is how Tex is described on the wrapper, with an image of two thin wafers at the top and bottom with a fat chocolate section in the middle.
But the actual bar “has an almost non-existent chocolate Aero centre,” Allan-Barrett complained, being “dominated” instead by the wafer biscuits.
Responding, Nestle explained to the ASA how the chocolate centre compressed when bitten into, resulting in a deformed chocolate section, before revealing that the company recently decided to change Tex's composition, making it more wafer orientated with less chocolate in the centre, “in line with its health and wellness strategy”.
That strategy no reduced its input costs, too, given that chocolate costs more to produce than wafer.
Unfortunately, and due to oversight, Nestle said, the packaging was not amended timeously to align with the new composition.
When the company realised this, it told the ASA, it immediately implemented steps to begin production of the new packaging, which is to start by the end of June.
And the company submitted to the ASA Directorate examples of the new packaging, reflecting an image of a cross-section of the bar with “substantially less” chocolate in the centre.
The Directorate said it was satisfied that the new wrapper image would address Allan-Barrett’s concerns and accepted Nestle’s undertaking to amend the wrapping image, provided the old wrapping was discontinued and not used again.
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