True Fruits Smoothies non-apology for "ugly girl friend" black bottle smoothie annoys vegans

As we reported earlier, True Fruits smoothies experienced a very negative reaction to the design & text on their black bottle smoothie, but True Fruits refused to apologise for the tone of voice the brand has decided to employ.

The black bottle is opaque, because while the blend of fruits in it taste great the mix makes for an unappetizing look, making their usual design of clear bottles an unwise choice.
It's the copy on the bottle that got True Fruits in trouble, proving to every copywriter out there who ever had to write for packaging that yes people do in fact read that, which is nice. The text on these bottles compared the not-so-pretty fruit mix with a not-so-pretty friend who had a great personality that you try to set up on blind dates, the black bottle is a blind taste test.

Facebook commenting storm ensued, and as Wuv.de reports, the tactic to keep responding to this with humour has turned part of the shitstorm into a fan & support network. There have been Facebook pages created against True Fruits, like NotSoTrueFruits which has documented true fruit packaging while suggesting smoothie brand alternatives. Meanwhile the Vegan Network "IndieVegan" wrote this post "Schluckbeschweden, meaning "difficulty swallowing", explaining that there's 'fat shaming' going on in the copy of some of the other True Fruit bottles which suggest people keep their "sausage fingers" away from the green drink.
The Vegan Network also bring up the Barilla hubub, where the pasta maker turned their attitude around and became a gay rights poster child changing their marketing, employment policies and even expanding their health benefits to include transgender-related care. The April Fools response to the facebook commenting storm regarding their black bottle which is accused of sexism was to apologize, in an irreverent manner while a man wearing only an apron and a shirt serves the boss coffee, in a mug labelled "the Boss".

 

+++ EILMELDUNG +++ Offizielle Stellungnahme und Entschuldigung von true fruits Co-Founder Nic.

Posted by true fruits Smoothies on Wednesday, April 1, 2015

The brand tone of voice firmly set, True Fruits have now thanked their fans for their support on Facebook, and announced that they do not delete comments. Ever. A very unusual tactic in this day and age, where most brands do a social media clean-up in comments as if they're battling the Ebola virus. It's, dare I say, a bold move. They'll block repeated trolls though.

Liebe true fruits Fans, We greatly appreciate your support in the last few days and would like to thank you for it. We are as we believe that our bottle copy is neither sexist nor is it lookism. However, we have found that there's isolated "sexism" and "lookism" in comments on our FB site. These few users we want clearly to understand this: with us, you will find no fertile ground for such thought! Because we are neither sexist nor lookists, and don't want to push such ideologies. The same applies to any forms of discrimination. Toodles you fanatics of all stripes. P.S.: it is contrary to our principles to delete any comments, and we are not going to start now. We reserve the right to block users who write sexist or discriminatory comments, however.

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