Coles has “admitted” it is likely to have misled customers after dropping its milk prices and claiming farmers would receive a higher cut, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has said.
Australia’s number two food retailer has accepted a court-enforceable undertaking to the ACCC after it published a social media campaign between February and May last year.
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The video, entitled “Our Coles brand milk story” and which ran on platforms including Facebook and YouTube, was launched at a time the of “intense public debate about the impact of A$1 (US$0.93) milk on Australian dairy farmers who supplied the product”, the ACCC said.
The campaign claimed Coles would absorb the profit loss and pay out a higher share to farmers. The ACCC’s investigation followed complaints from dairy farmers about representations in the cartoon and video about the impact of Coles’ move to cut prices in 2011.
“Coles represented in a video and cartoon on social media that the farmgate milk price increased from 86 cents per two-litre bottle of Coles-brand milk in 2010-11 to around 90 cents in 2011-12, when in fact this was an estimate and final industry figures showed the 2011-12 farmgate milk price actually decreased to 84 cents,” ACCC chairman Rod Sims said.
He said: “The ACCC was concerned that Coles presented estimates and opinions as facts and that a number of representations made in the video and cartoon could not be substantiated by Coles.
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By GlobalData“Businesses should also be aware that even where a representation might seek to inform the public about a matter that is the subject of political debate, if it goes further and encourages or promotes the sale of a product or service, it must be compliant with the Australian consumer law.
