Vegans are kicking off after Rude Health started promoting full fat milk :-: Metro
METRO
Rude Health is an alternative health food brand.
You’ve probably seen their extortionately priced but delicious-looking granola in Whole Foods. Their nut milks taste really good and have a high proportion of nuts-and-rice-to-water ratio (a rarity).
Anyway, as you might imagine, a large proportion of their client base is vegan.
Their porridge pots are one of the few porridge pots on the market that don’t have powered cow’s milk inside.
Vegans aren’t the only ones who drink nut milks (they’re a God-send for lactose-intolerant people too) but it’s safe to say that many of their customers are consciously plant-based.
So when Rude Health posted a gif of some 90s dude throwing stones in a river with the line: ‘You’re in Rude Health when…you skim stones, not milk’, it put quite a lot of noses out of joint.
‘We may be dairy alternative producers but that doesn’t mean we are against dairy,’ the company wrote in the caption.
(You know already that this kind of thing would go down like a sack of sh*t).
‘We are for good quality, proper milk…we’re talking whole milk. Full fat milk. We don’t use skimmed milk powder in any of our foods.
‘Nature has provided us with an ingredient that is the perfect balance of protein, good fats and natural sugars (lactose). Why mess with it? When they take cream out of milk, they remove most of the texture and all of the joy. We are not skimmed milk people, we live life to the full, with full fat dairy products.’
Fair enough, you might think. There’s something to be said for drinking full fat milk if you want to drink animal milk.
But many of Rude Health’s customers don’t want to.
And they haven’t been backwards in coming forwards with their criticisms.
One person writes: ‘I guess we all know where Rude Health got money to start up their business…turn your back on all the people who have supported – like Alpro. T***s.’
Another says: ‘Well done, you’re going to be losing a most of your customers…your main customer demographic is vegan. Promoting animal agriculture when it is proven how damaging in every way (health, environment, animal welfare) it is, is just disgusting and wrong.
‘Animal milk is not for us. It is to feed baby animals. It is not natural in any sense of the word to pump milk out of animals, taking it from the babies and giving it to human beings is just weird as f*ck and not at all natural.’
Basically, Plenish are about to get a load more buyers because the vegan community ain’t happy, Rude Health.
‘Not cool guys =/ the dairy industry is cruel Af and it has never been natural for a 45-year-old businessman or an 18-year-old fitness junkie to bend over and suck milk out of an animal. I’m disappointed to hear that a company that produces such awesome products doesn’t believe in changing the world for the future generations and eliminating animal slavery,’ says another former customer.
In fact, there are hundreds of comments from people saying they’ll never buy their products again.
It’s absolute brand suicide.
As follower Max says: ”F*cking idiots – whoever’s in charge of your social media has gone and lost a f*ck load of customers!’
Now, we should point out again that Rude Health isn’t a vegan brand – it’s a nut-based health food label which has a lot of vegan customers by default.
More: Food
There will be a lot of people who buy their products who simply do so because they like the taste of nuts/want products free from refined sugars/want to moderate their intake of dairy. And Rude Health sort of have a right to say that they believe full fat is better than skimmed milk. It’s a free country, after all.
But that doesn’t stop this from being a terrible marketing move for a company which makes a lot of its money from people who are trying to make the world a better place by actively swerving animal products.
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