Hacker News Reader

Comment by cianmm | Hacker News Reader

A difference might be that your examples are all trademarked words. Milk isn't.

From a marketing perspective saying something is a "milk alternative" or whatever is mostly to market to non-vegans so that they know what to buy if they're looking to get into that area. [Shaky unverifiable source - I know somebody who develops these products for large companies]

View on HN

Trademarks protect the market position of one particular company. Similarly, protected origin designations and protected product names reserve words for any producer of "the original, proper" thing. Thereby protecting not only the producers' interests but also the consumer, because misleading labeling and advertising is prevented.

If you'd allow stuff like "milk alternative", you'd quickly get "<huge>MILK</huge><tiny color=unreadable>alternative</tiny>".

Just don’t allow that, it doesn’t seem to be a slippery slope at all. Is there any evidence people are getting fooled by oat milk or nut cheese?

Well, I'd be fooled by "nut cheese". I'd expect cheese with nuts in it...

Perhaps the closest analogy is “method Champagnois” for sparkling white wine produced using champagne grape varieties and techniques, before the word champagne became protected, and “method Champagnois” thus became illegal.

Not making a judgement either way. Personally, I feel these alternatives work in the same place as milk (coffee, cereal, et cetera), but are nutritionally very different from milk so I can appreciate both sides of this argument.

So then prohibit misleading product packaging rather than prohibiting a specific phrase.

Misleading packaging has forbidden for ages. Didn't really work out since companies will always try to game the system, binding up resources in endless court battles around the definition of "misleading" and "what font size is legally conspicuous enough yet will still be overlooked by the customer". Therefore the next step was to make very clear and very simple rules around "what is misleading?". One of them is something like "milk is the secretion from the udder of mamalians, nothing else".

That’s why make labels standardized. In fact they already are in a lot of ways. Nutrition facts, ingredients, allergens, etc.

Yes, and one of the standards is (unsurprisingly) not using misleading terminology such as "milk" for non-milk products. Just label it as "white oat drink" and you are fine...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com