A complaint against Asahi’s Super Dry beer has not been upheld by the alcohol industry’s Independent Complaint Panel.
The complaint, received from a member of the public, raised concerns that the alcoholic nature of the drink ‘was not communicated on its packaging with absolute clarity’, because a ‘zero-like’ figure on the front label might cause a consumer to mistake the beer for an alcohol-free product.
Under Code rule 3.1, the Panel considered that possibility of confusion, but noted that the disputed label figure was a square, presented as a Kanji character in a wider Japanese context, rather than a circle.
It therefore considered that the majority of consumers would be unlikely to mistake it as a reference to a drink containing zero alcohol.
The Panel also assessed the front and back label of the drink and noted that there were several instances of ‘positive alcohol cues’ on the front label, including references to ‘beer’ and ‘brewing’ several times.
The back label also included alcohol cues such as the word ‘beer’, a responsible drinking message, unit content information and the drink’s alcoholic strength by volume (ABV). After assessing the packaging in its entirety, the Panel did not uphold the complaint.
Chair of the Independent Complaints Panel, Rachel Childs, said: “While the Panel expressed a degree of sympathy regarding the potential for confusion between alcoholic and non-alcoholic products which share the same branding, in this case they concluded that the product communicated its alcoholic nature with absolute clarity due to a number of positive alcohol cues and as a result did not uphold the complaint.”
