21 Nov 2014 Mayonnaise wars: Unilever takes on start-up Hampton Creek

A big-money war is brewing over the meaning of America’s best-selling condiment: mayonnaise. The maker of Hellmann’s mayo, food giant Unilever, has sued the San Francisco start-up behind Just Mayo, an egg-less, mayonnaise-like sandwich spread giving Big Mayo a run for its money.

The global food giant argues that Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo is not, as Unilever lawyers wrote, “exactly, precisely, only and simply mayonnaise,” as defined by the dictionary and the Food and Drug Administration, which says mayo must include “egg yolk-containing ingredients.”

The Just Mayo identity crisis, Unilever lawyers said, has hurt Hellmann’s market share, “caused consumer deception and serious, irreparable harm to Unilever” and the mayo industry as a whole. The firm wants Hampton Creek to stop calling it Just Mayo, yank the product off store shelves and pay Unilever damages worth three times the startup’s profits.

It is a strangely defensive stance for Unilever, a Big Food titan that made more than $64 billion last year selling foodstuffs in nearly 200 countries (including “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”, a spread that is not butter). Hellmann’s, which is branded Best Foods west of the Rocky Mountains, dominates 45 percent of the mayo market, data from industry researcher Euromonitor shows.

But market watchers say it highlights the fears from traditional food conglomerates facing unexpected competition from crafty start-ups. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the biggest battleground is mayonnaise: Americans buy $2 billion of the stuff every year — more even than ketchup, salsa or soy sauce.

“It’s not about using the (mayo) word,” said Michele Simon, a public health attorney who wrote about the suit. “It’s about the fact that this company is taking market share away. And now it’s like they’ve awakened the giant.”
That the plant-based Just Mayo is a new type of food will lend an interesting dimension to the legal proceedings: Brand disputes typically quibble over words, not the definition of the product itself.

But the very modern legal battle will be fought on regulatory territory that is decades old. The FDA’s definition of mayonnaise was set in 1957, decades before the phrase “vegan mayo” ever made sense. (Maintaining that “standard of identity” is important: Kraft Foods’ Miracle Whip, which doesn’t meet the FDA’s standard, is technically a salad dressing.)

Unilever doesn’t just call out Just Mayo for what it calls confusing branding — advertisements have called the stuff “mayo,” and its logo resembles an egg — it also says the company has no proof in its claims of beating Hellmann’s in a taste test.

So what’s spooking Big Food? Hampton Creek has some big backers, including Bill Gates, and in a matter of months has spread rapidly to more than 20,000 Walmarts, Costcos and other stores across the country.

While other organic spreads like Vegenaise play up their place in the vegan niche, Hampton Creek has widely promoted Just Mayo as a mainstream brand: healthy, cheap and good for everybody. (Company ads rarely call it “vegan.”)

“We don’t market our product to tree-hugging liberals in San Francisco, even though I’m in the middle of nine of them right now,” said Josh Tetrick, Hampton Creek’s founder and chief executive. “We built the company to try to really penetrate the places where better-for-you food hasn’t gone before, and that means right in the condiment aisle of Walmart.”….

Washington Post: Read the full article

Additional reading:

Big mayo vs little mayo: which brand has egg on its face?

There have been no shortage of headlines recounting the legal kerfuffle unfolding over the definition of mayonnaise.

Global food giant Unilever, which owns the ubiquitous Hellmann’s brand, is suing Hampton Creek, the maker of of Just Mayo, an egg-free spread made from peas, sorghum and other plants…..

“Companies protect their brand at all cost,” says John Stanton, a professor of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. If Unilever’s lawyers can use decades’ old regulations defining what constitutes mayonnaise to protect their brand’s market share, they will do it.

But it’s possible that this strategy has backfired. Consumer sentiment seems squarely behind the new kid on the block, not the Big Food giant….

Mayo wars: Hold the sustainable sanctimony

…It appears to expose Unilever’s sustainability as a cover for market hungry “greed,” an attempt to crush a smaller rival in the law courts rather than the marketplace. Its move has unleashed a slew of criticism, and inevitably opened Unilever to ridicule (“egg on the face” being the cliché of choice). It has also delivered a bonanza of free publicity for Just Mayo.

Not merely was the lawsuit ill-conceived, but the inevitable counterattack has revealed that some of Unilever’s mayonnaise brand extensions offend the very FDA rules it is invoking. When such facts were pointed out, Unilever responded by attempting to shove the website evidence down the Orwellian memory hole. The company started grafting the words “mayonnaise dressing” onto products that failed to meet the definition of mayonnaise. It also doctored blog posts, and, when it was outed, removed them completely…..