Friday, October 5, 2012

Misleading Advertising

A few days back, I purchased a bag of Nestle Halloween Mini's... The bag shows a picture of the 3 bars it contains (Crunch, Butter Finger and Baby Ruth) and stated it had 90 bars in it. I picked it up, because I like to treat my daughter (who is almost 25, but of course still MY baby...) and share surprises.

Later on, the bag was opened, contents dumped, and the sorting for sharing commenced. During that process, 2 bars were found that were NOT enclosed in any wrappers, nor were there any empty wrappers. Now, considering we are in the middle of some pretty intense food issues with the E.coli thing... I naturally was concerned about the quality control.

As the process of sorting continued, things were just not balancing out at all. A closer look showed yes, the bag did have exactly 90 bars (including the 2 unwrapped ones) but... but... it had 20 Crunch bars, 30 Baby Ruth bars and 40 Butter Finger bars.

Well crap. That's not what I bought... so I fired off a web complaint on the Nestle Canadian site, giving them all of the contact details, bar codes, etc... and mentioned the 2 issues I found. I figure if a company is going to advertise something (in this case product contents) then it should at least have what it implies it has. And of course, having 2 not in wrappers is a clear quality control health concern.

A few days later, I got an email response (incorrectly punctuated and all to boot) saying they couldn't guarantee equal distribution and they would report those numbers to quality control. But not one word on the exposed bars. So I emailed them back, advising their response was unacceptable, and that the packaging should be safe and accurate. Or else change the packaging to indicate there may not be an equal share of each bar. In addition, I also advised them that I should take this matter to the Canadian authorities and possibly to social media as well.

Again I get a canned, incorrectly formatted response back. And I am thinking that if you can't even cut and paste your apologies and excuses correctly, then your quality control in the plant probably sucks just as much... So I went to the Governments website, filed a false advertising complaint along with mentioning the unwrapped bars... and then emailed Nestle back again, expressing my concerns, advising of the filing of the report, and said that I was done in dealing with them.

Well... a few hours later, someone from Nestle calls me on the phone. "Blah blah this and that and yes, we totally missed replying to the exposed bars... we take our stuff seriously blah blah..."

A little too late... Sorry... I pointed out the failed email responses and inaccurate advertising, the bad punctuation and formatting, the consistency they demonstrated in cutting and pasting canned responses... And of course they apologized again.

I am the consumer. I am the one buying your products (for whatever company you are) and I am tired of being mislead. You may be the 1% and think you can just do whatever it is you want, and could care less. I however, am the 99%. And you need to be honest with what you are doing. And from a food consumption point, you damn well better be clean about what you do.

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