Genki Forest Angers Consumers With Misleading Packaging and Poor Apology

Crisis management is important for brands especially who are new to the China market. Even local brands, who naturally have a deep understanding of Chinese consumers, aren’t exempt from getting into hot water. (Just take a look at last month’s Ubras scandal). This month, the offender is Genki Forest (元气森林), a popular beverage brand that started having a PR crisis due to some misleading packaging. If the problem had stopped there, that would have been fine, but instead, this Genki Forest made consumers even angrier with a performative apology.  

The Genki Forest Incident

The crisis started from a query from a Zhihu user on January 9. He found that on Genki Forest’s packaging, it said “zero cane sugar, low fat”, while there was crystalline fructose on its ingredient list. The user was questioning whether this was false marketing. Well, technically it’s not, because crystalline fructose isn’t cane sugar.

The next day, Genki Forest apologized on Zhihu and said it should have made the labels on the package clear to avoid misunderstanding, and it promised that it would upgrade the labels in three months.

On April 10, exactly three months after the last announcement on January 10, Genki Forest made another official announcement. In the statement, Genki Forest said it should have made it clear the difference between zero cane sugar and zero sugar.

In the statement, Genki Forest also told consumers that they have changed the tag since February 4. What’s more, since March 20, its milk tea doesn’t contain crystalline fructose anymore.

The statement looks perfect. But except for the “we are sorry” at the beginning, it is in fact not really making it clear what they have done wrong. Because once Genki Forest did, it will be found out that their advertisements are lying to consumers all the time.

What Did Genki Forest Do Wrong?

Genki Forest was founded in 2016. It is well-known for its zero cane sugar and zero fat beverages, such as flavored seltzer and milk tea.

As we just mentioned above, for a very long time, it was promoting itself as zero cane sugar. But in most consumers’ mind, zero cane sugar equals zero sugar, and they were buying this drink because they thought it was zero sugar. Genki Forest was clearly aware of this misunderstanding. What the brand did wrong was not correcting the misunderstanding and letting consumers keep thinking their drinks were zero sugar.

Using Sugar Substitutes

It turns out that to add the sweet flavor to their drinks, Genki Forest was using other sugar substitutes. Though they are not cane sugar, the sweet flavour it generates can be 200-300 times higher than cane sugar.

If you compare those zero-cane-sugar drinks with others that have added cane sugar, they are indeed healthier. But it is also shown that drinks with sugar substitutes don’t help people lose weight and they may actually guide consumers to intake higher calorie food. This is because those sugar substitutes generate sweeter flavour and the flavour makes people’s mind more excited and more likely to crave salty and fatty foods.

Sugar substitutes will also increase people’s blood glucose and might deliver the wrong message to our brain that we are taking in sugar. This will lead to the dyssecretosis of insulin and people might get fat because of it.

This Violates Chinese Advertisement Law

The fourth regulation on Chinese Advertisement Law (中华人民共和国广告法) clearly states that advertisements are not allowed to include any misleading information.

Genki Forest knew that many Chinese consumers, especially young ones, tend to lack knowledge and awareness about healthy nutrition and checking ingredients. So they made use of this blind spot and led consumers to think that zero cane sugar equalled to zero sugar.

What makes things worse is that, while the wording “zero cane sugar” on the packaging could be passed off as unclear and easy to misunderstand, you can’t use the same excuse for the brand’s advertisements. Just Google Yuanqi Senlin or Genki Forest and you’ll see numerous ads like this that state “zero sugar, zero fat and zero calorie”. Not zero cane sugar, just straight up ‘no sugar’.

A couple months ago, the brand sponsored Bilibili’s New Year Gala and it directly said its products were “zero sugar, zero fat and zero calorie”. Unlike the label, this is purely lying.

What’s Wrong With Genki Forest’s Latest Apology?

Back to Genki Forest’s latest statement on April 10. Why did some people buy it while others felt like Genki Forest was not being honest with consumers?

Like every other crisis apology, the brand started with a performative “we are sorry”.

In the second paragraph, the brand told people that because it didn’t make the difference between zero cane sugar and zero sugar clear, it caused a misunderstanding among consumers.

In the third and fourth paragraphs, it shared what actions it had taken to make up for the mistake.

This may seem like a good apology. But it also seems too innocent. It makes Genki Forest appear like it didn’t realize until now that consumers had this misunderstanding. Which is just not possible considering that it rose to fame as part of the current low-sugar, zero sugar trend popular among Chinese consumers and consumer reviews all praise the fact that it tastes so good yet has zero sugar.

Will Genki Forest be able to earn back consumers’ trust? Will they continue buying it? We’ll have to wait and see.

Read more: 元气森林真的道歉了吗？就差说是消费者的福报了