Commercial property supermarket chain Sainsbury’s £10m “feed your family for £50” advertising promotion has been banned because its meal plans failed to offer enough calories and cost more than marketed.
The big-budget advertisement campaign-a follow up to the successful and popular “feed your family for a fiver” fronted by Jamie Oliver-provided a choice of meal plans that assured consumers that they could feed a family of four for a week for just £50.
The Advertising Standards Authority received seven complaints, including that £50 did not cover necessary ingredients, the meal ideas did not offer an adequate amount of calories for a family of four for a week and that it was not appropriate for children under the age of four.
Commercial property supermarket chain Sainsbury’s maintained that the meal ideas were purposely designed to offer only 75 per cent of the suggested adult daily requirement of 2,000 calories. The commercial property supermarket giant said that the rest of the daily requirement comes from snacking that happens outside of meals.
The Government’s Department of Health states that the ratio must be 80 per cent of calories from mealtimes and 20 per cent from snacks daily.
All the same, the ASA ruled that even though the meal plans had been constructed responsibly the claim that a family could meet all its calorie requirements for a week was misrepresentative.
The commercial property supermarket said that it used the store cupboard ingredient principle, a common method in food magazines. This method takes into account the common items individuals have in their cupboards that stretch to several meals-such as oil, mustard, garlic, flour and herbs-which as a result may not be built-in to the meal plans for every dish publicised in commercial property supermarket Sainsbury’s campaign.
The ASA said: “The percentage of people who had each of those ingredients at home varied considerably and was, for some of the ingredients, quite low.”
They further added: “We consequently understood that a significant number of consumers would have to buy additional ingredients, and concluded that, on this point, the claim was misleading.”
In terms of the appropriateness of the meals for four-year-olds, supermarket chain Sainsbury’s said that the TV advertisement made it clear those children under that age have variable nutritional needs and that some of the eating plan was not appropriate.
The ASA said that because consumers with children under the age of four would have to adjust the meal plans and buy extra ingredients, the campaign was confusing. Therefore, the advertising regulator banned the campaign, telling commercial property supermarket chain Sainsbury’s to alter its claims before running it in the future.
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