British healthy food and drinks brand Rude Health has long played on the double meaning of its name (the British idiom ‘rude health’ means enjoying good health). The company’s co-founders have always encouraged robust debate on the subject of food , and they invite customers to be rude – or nice – to Rude Health on its website and social media channels. This week, quite a lot of people took them up on the first offer. And they gave the company a right earful.
The trigger for this social mauling was a blog post, or ‘rant’, written by Rude Health co-founder (and marketing director) Camilla Barnard. Titled ‘About cutting out food types’, the post takes no prisoners as it rips through a catalogue of current dietary regimes – from clean eating to Paleo, gluten-free to veganism – castigating proponents for nutritional cherry-picking, making implausible health claims and creating fear around food.
As I understand it, Camilla Barnard’s biggest frustration is a growing tendency to value what is absent in food, rather than celebrating food – and the act of eating – in the round. It’s a concern many people in the natural food industry probably share. We’ve written about these very same issues ourselves. So far, so uncontroversial.
Rude Health started out as a breakfast cereal brand, adding dairy-free drinks to its product line-up a few years down the line. It became a plant-based food company without especially positioning itself as that, preferring instead to talk about “standing up for real, honest food”. And as Camilla Barnard says herself, the brand has never been anti-dairy (“quite the opposite, we are for good quality, proper milk”). This is where the brand has run into a problem. Because some of its customers are very anti-dairy.
Most of the angriest comments about Camilla Barnard’s blog have come from vegans. Rude Health’s vegan customers accuse her of mocking vegan values and of confusing ethical veganism with fashionable food avoidance diets.
The debate around veganism is changing. As the vegan movement is emboldened by its growing ranks of followers, attitudes to meat-eating (and all animal product use) are hardening. This is creating a particular challenge for brands in the growing plant-based food category. While the border between veganism and plant-based diets might seen blurred, it is anything but neutral territory. In fact, the likelihood is that this is going to become an even trickier space for brands to navigate. In short, brands will need to understand that people are buying their products for very different reasons.
Rude Health has built a loyal customer following over the years, and it’s refreshing to see a brand so obviously have the courage of its own convictions. But it’s never a good idea to tell your customers that they are buying your products for the wrong reasons!