The advertising watchdog has censured Birds Eye for running a TV campaign that exaggerated the size of its ready meals which the company argued was necessary to “bring life to the ingredients”.
Birds Eye ran a TV campaign for its Stir Your Senses ready-made meals range which shows a man and woman cooking one of its pasta products.
A pack of one of the ready meals, which serve one person, was shown as the couple heated a meal. Later the woman was seen eating one of the products from a bowl.
The Advertising Standards Authority received a complaint that the ad was misleading because it exaggerated the portion size of the product.
Birds Eye said that because the ad showed a couple in the kitchen, consumers would expect more than one pack to be used, even though just one singe-serve packet was promoted.
The company used one portion in the scene of the woman eating from a bowl. However, it admitted it had used more in the cooking shots to “bring to life the ingredients” as well as to “dramatise the two-person occasion” of the opening scene.
The ASA purchased the product shown in the ad, Tagliatelle con Porcini, and cooked it to test the size of the meal in real life compared to the one on screen.
The ASA was not impressed, noting that the cooking shots and the bowl shots showed bulked-up portions that exaggerated how much food a consumer could expect.
“We considered that both the pan and bowl shots in the ad appeared to contain more pasta and mushrooms when compared to one real-life serving,” said the ASA. “Because of that, and because viewers were likely to expect the amounts shown in the ad to be equivalent to one packet of the product, but that was not always the case, we concluded that the ad exaggerated the portion size of the product and was therefore misleading.”
The ASA banned the TV ad and told Nomad Foods Europe, the parent company of Birds Eye, not to exaggerate the portion sizes of its products in future ad campaigns.
