Farmers have welcomed the move by the European Court of Justice to clamp down on plant-based foods being called milk, cheese or butter.

Yesterday’s ruling by the European Court of Justice outlining that purely plant-based products can no longer be marketed with designations such as milk, cheese or butter has been commended by the IFA and ICMSA.

IFA dairy committee chair Sean O’Leary welcomed the change: “We have enough work to do selling our own products, never mind these various concoctions being labelled as milk.”

The European Court of Justice has said that designations such as milk or butter are now reserved by EU law for animal products.

Healthy desires

ICMSA president John Comer also welcomed the decision, saying he believed that corporations had quite deliberately played on people’s desire for healthy, traditional, dairy-based foodstuffs, while actually substituting real dairy ingredients with cheaper and more processed vegetable and plant-derived elements.

It was blatantly unfair and a breach of product descriptions as any reasonable person would understand that term.

“Anything that supported genuine dairy foods was to the benefit of Ireland’s grass-based and progressive dairy farmer sector,” Comer maintained.

Court case

The ruling came after a case against Tofu Town, a German company, which distributes vegetarian and vegan foods such as “soyatoo tofu butter’, “plant cheese” and “veggie cheese”.

There has been growing opposition by farmers to companies that call plant-based drinks ‘‘milk’’ in both America and Australia over the past year with Dairy Connect, an Australian-based lobby group, calling for increased regulation around labelling.

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