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From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (Commission) has served final order on a beverage company, Coca-Cola and Nigerian Bottling Company Limited (NBC) for action on an ongoing investigation that borders on alleged misleading/deceptive product labelling.
FCCPC, in the final order, said the beverage company had migrated some of their products, Coke brand, from a formulation that included regular sugar to non-nutritive sweeteners without providing adequate information to consumers.
In the final order paper which was made available to journalists yesterday, it highlighted that the company was found to have been involved in misleading trade descriptions, making consumers believe that Coca-Cola Original Taste is not materially different from Coca-Cola Original Taste ‘Less Sugar.’
The Commission said it opened a formal investigation on the matter, and between June 2019 and December 2020, the Commission and Coca-Cola, as well as NBC engaged in repeated meetings, including seeking and securing vast internal documents and production logs to determine the veracity or otherwise of the issues that were subject of investigation or explanation.
And by December 2020, the Commission was convinced, based on the evidence, that Coca-Cola and NBC on multiple occasions violated and remained in violation of the FCCPC Act, particularly with respect to transparency and clear disclosure obligations to their product patrons, intentional communications in describing their Coca-Cola “Original Taste, Less Sugar variant as one and the same, as well as unchanged, when in actual fact, same had indeed changed.
FCCPC said that Coca-Cola and NBC initially sought to end the investigation and regulatory process by adopting clearer, more transparent and truthful descriptions and differentiation of the relevant variants of their products which it granted, and also gave Coca-Cola and NBC the opportunity and prerogative to propose remedies, including descriptions and product differentiations, that comply with applicable statutory standards.
The Commission, however, confirmed that it had a lengthy engagement with Coca-Cola and NBC on a process of building consensus around a mutually agreed differentiation and description of the different relevant products.
It added that Coca-Cola and NBC sought an extended timeline before changing to the newly mutually agreed product descriptions and differentiations as proposed by Coca-Cola and NBC in order to exhaust existing packaging inventory, and lead time for new packaging inventory to arrive in stock. The Commission granted the extension as requested.
