Online stores fall foul of tobacco law

Foodtown and Woolworths have each been offering around 10 light or mild brands on their shopping websites. Photo / Brett Phibbs

The Foodtown and Woolworths supermarket chains will remove the words "light" and "mild" from cigarette adverts on their online shopping websites, after the Herald told them of an official warning against using the "potentially misleading" terms.

The Commerce Commission in 2008 issued a public warning to New Zealand's three main tobacco companies over "light" and "mild" on tobacco packaging, saying the terms may mislead consumers and therefore risked breaching the Fair Trading Act.

The commission said consumers may believe they were exposing themselves to less harm by smoking those cigarettes, but there was "no such thing as a safe, or safer, cigarette".

British American Tobacco NZ's head of corporate and regulatory affairs Susan Jones said her company, and rivals Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris, had all stopped using the terms light and mild on their products. The three companies' products accounted for 99 per cent of tobacco sold in New Zealand.

On the virtually identical cigarette pages of their shopping websites, Foodtown and Woolworths - part of the Progressive Enterprises group - have each been offering around 10 light or mild brands.

These are in addition to products with colour names, like gold or blue, and the use of new descriptive words like "subtle" or "mellow" - which tobacco control campaigners say are the new code words, well understood by smokers, to denote light or mild.

Progressive's general manager of merchandise Murray Johnston said last night, "We had not been advised by the Commerce Commission that advice regarding cigarette labelling had been given to cigarette producers. Now that we are aware of this issue, the information on our online shopping websites will be changed within 24 hours."

The commission said it was not aware supermarkets were using the light and mild descriptors for tobacco on their websites. It would be "assessing the information to see what, if any, further action may be appropriate".

The Ministry of Health said that, in response to a complaint, it was seeking legal advice on whether new phrases being used on cigarette packets breached the smoke-free environments laws:

"The ministry is interested in ensuring that terms that could potentially mislead consumers are not used on tobacco products."

But the smoke-free act and regulations did not cover use of potentially misleading terms such as light and mild.

Associate Professor Nick Wilson and colleagues at Otago University found last year in a study of 1208 discarded cigarette packs, that 8 per cent had colour words like "original silver", indicating the contents were what used to be called light or mild, while 2 per cent carried words suggestive of mildness, like "refined".

They said in the NZ Medical Journal that when the words light and mild were banned from tobacco packets overseas, manufacturers kept these cigarettes on the market and applied new words like smooth and fine.

Before the new rules came into effect, they developed new packet colour differences to help smokers to continue to identify the light and mild brands.

The researchers want the Government to force all tobacco into plain packets with pictorial health warnings - the policy which will come into effect in Australia in 2012 and which has been promoted by submitters at the New Zealand Maori affairs select committee's tobacco inquiry.