Unilever, Suing Over Rival’s Use of ‘Mayo,’ Changes Own Website


By STEPHANIE STROMNOV. 16, 2014

Last Friday, changes suddenly began appearing on websites associated
with mayonnaise.

The word “dressing” was added to comments that consumers had posted
referring to Hellmann’s mayonnaise dressing with olive oil as simply
“mayonnaise.”

And a post to Pinterest that had promoted Hellmann’s creamy balsamic
mayonnaise dressing as “mayonnaise over the top in taste” vanished —
although it still can be seen on Twitter.

The changes represented another round in the fight between the
consumer product and food giant Unilever and a tiny start-up, Hampton
Creek, which it has sued over the eggless, mayonnaiselike spread
Hampton Creek has been selling as Just Mayo for a little less than a
year.

Unilever claims that the word “mayo” and the image of an egg cracked
by a pea shoot that Hampton Creek uses on its packaging fraudulently
leads consumers to believe the product contains eggs. It also contends
that consumers equate “mayo” with mayonnaise, which must contain eggs
under the standard set by the Food and Drug Administration in 1957.

“They have an egg on their package but not in their product — they’re
just not mayo,” Mike Faherty, vice president for foods of Unilever
North America, said Sunday in the company’s first comments about the
case.

The F.D.A. has even gotten involved, contacting Hampton Creek. No
other information about the agency’s role was available.

“We’ve been going back and forth with them because the simple fact
that this has happened speaks to the larger issue, which is we need
for our regulatory framework to be more into line with the way we hope
people are starting to eat,” said Josh Tetrick, the founder of Hampton
Creek. “My hope is that the F.D.A., Congress and policy leaders are
seeing the incredible amount of attention this is getting and will
start thinking about that.”

Just Mayo, which does not use the word “mayonnaise” to describe
itself, contains Canadian yellow peas instead of eggs.

On Friday, Hampton Creek, which is represented by the law firm Boies,
Schiller & Flexner, was collecting information for a countersuit,
combing websites for Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which is sold as Best
Foods west of the Rockies.

On Nov. 4, the company wrote to Unilever pointing out that it had used
the word “mayo” to describe products that do not meet the Food and
Drug Administration’s definition of mayonnaise, which includes eggs
and a certain percentage of oil.

And consumers posting comments on the Hellmann’s site — or the site of
Best Foods — referred to what Unilever calls “mayonnaise dressing” as
simply “mayonnaise” or “mayo.”

Mr. Tetrick happened to be on the Hellmann’s site on Friday, talking
with Michele Simon, a public health blogger and lawyer who has written
about the lawsuit, when Unilever was making changes. The page for
Hellmann’s creamy balsamic mayonnaise dressing disappeared as the two
spoke.

“It was kind of freaky,” Ms. Simon said. “I was on the phone with
Josh, and he was reading something from Hellmann’s website to me — and
then it just vanished.”

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In August, the page for Best Foods Canola Cholesterol-Free Mayonnaise,
which lacks the amount of oil required to call a product mayonnaise
under the F.D.A. standard, did not include the word “dressing.” It now
does.

Unilever edited customer comments that referred to mayonnaise dressing
simply as “mayonnaise.” Early Friday, for instance, a comment by a
consumer read, “I could taste no difference in the olive oil
mayonnaise and I will continue to buy it because it has olive oil in
it!”

It vanished, then reappeared seven minutes later, Ms. Simon and Mr.
Tetrick said, reading, “I could taste no difference in the olive oil
mayonnaise dressing and I will continue to buy it because it has olive
oil in it. “

At least 10 customer comments have been removed from Hellmann’s and
Best Foods sites since Friday, Hampton Creek said.

Mr. Faherty said that was proof that Unilever had moved promptly to
address the issues raised by Hampton Creek. “Contrast our actions over
the last week and Hampton Creek’s,” he said. “They’ve known about
their misleading labels for months and done nothing, but the minute we
found out there was something misleading on our pages, we took
action.”

He said some customer comments were “inadvertently edited when they
should have just been removed.”