In past posts about claims substantiation, such as this post entitled “Why Claim Substantiation Matters“, I have written about industries that are currently involved in debates over claim substantiation. This is the start of what will eventually be a running list of places where claim substantiation is affecting consumers, businesses, and industries.
 
Battles over claim substantiation are particularly complex because they touch two contradictory goals: protecting consumers in the marketplace from deception and confusion, while protecting marketers’ rights to market.

An Update on Sunscreen

I’ve written about the FDA’s efforts over sunscreen, trying to establish a consistent set of rules and labels to govern terms such as sunblock (to be banned entirely) or water-resistant (to be allowed but only with information about how long the sunscreen works). The new requirements, which were to take place in June of 2012, are now delayed to December. You can read about it at NPR here, or at BusinessWeek here.

Pizza and Labeling

Many of you have no doubt heard about efforts to establish and/or strengthen requirements that chain restaurants indicate caloric and/or nutritional content of their menu items. This item concerns a more complex item: pizza. On the one hand, a 12” medium pan pizza at Pizza Hut has 2,000 calories and 4,720 mg of sodium. On the other hand, perhaps it is unlikely that a single person would eat all 8 slides in the medium pan pizza. Also, efforts to label pizza are made much more complicated by the fact that pizza is an item that is customized by the consumer, and customization can substantially change nutritional content. As reported by Nation’s Restaurant News, the pizza industry has recently started The American Pizza Community to address menu labeling requirements. Stand by for more as it happens.

Dr. Bruce Isaacson,
President,
MMR Strategy Group