Butter must be produced “from milk or milk products”; ice cream must be made from “cream, milk, or other milk products”; cheese must have among its ingredients “milk, skim milk, cream, reconstituted milk powder, reconstituted skim milk powder, or a combination thereof.” And milk? “Milk or whole milk, as used in the manufacture of dairy products, means the normal lacteal secretion, free from colostrum, obtained from the mammary gland of an animal.” It could not be clearer. For a product to claim that is a dairy product, it must include milk, which comes from the mammary glands of an animal, or in our case cow’s milk. However, it could also be goat milk or buffalo milk. Regardless of this, many companies are willing to defy the Canadian regulations. Why? Because they know that they can reap all the benefits of associating themselves with the positive image of milk and dairy products, the image of a natural, quality and local product. To boost sales, they try to imitate, copy and plagiarize not only the names of our products but also their visuals, packaging and marketing.
“Vegetable butter,” which is nothing more than margarine, is presented in a block wrapped in aluminum depicting farm pastures, fences and barns. Every effort is made to evoke a rustic and healthy agricultural product, even though everyone knows that this product’s list of ingredients has more to do with a laboratory than a farm pasture. As for fluid milk, its ingredients are milk and vitamin D (as required by Quebec regulations). In comparison, oat drinks have a list of ingredients that would fill this page and the next. The trend is clearly to consume products that have been processed as little as possible. These imitations are unable to compete with the nutritional properties of milk, which is why they mimic its marketing to deceive consumers who, according to our data, mostly recognize that plant-based drinks are not healthier than cow’s milk.
We are not simply sitting by and accepting this misappropriation of dairy terms by companies attempting to compete with our products. Steps are being taken at the federal level to denounce and request corrections in these blatant cases of dairy term plagiarism. Complaints can also be filed with the Ministère de l’Agriculture, des Pêcheries et de l’Alimentation (MAPAQ) for misleading advertising or label fraud (see QR code below). These complaints can be made on an individual basis, and the more complaints that are filed, the better chance we will have of prompting action from the MAPAQ. For that reason, I urge producers and all our partners to vigorously denounce every case of plagiarism they come across.
There is another reason not to overlook this situation. Our products are not only nutritious, healthy and minimally processed, but also quite simply delicious. It would be a shame if consumers, confused by the packaging, purchase foods that are not dairy products and do not meet their expectations for freshness, flavour or nutritional value.
Daniel Gobeil, Chairman