Wellington- GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-largest food and pharmaceutical company, is saying sorry in nationwide advertising campaigns which began this week for misleading New Zealand and Australian consumers about the vitamin C content of its Ribena blackcurrant drink. The apology follows prosecution by New Zealand's watchdog Consumer Commission after two 14-year-old Auckland schoolgirls on a science project tested the drink and found it contained no traceable amounts of the vitamin.
The company admitted in March breaching the Fair Trading Act with false claims about the health benefits of Ribena and was fined a total of 227,500 New Zealand dollars (161,525 US dollars) on 15 representative charges.
"We are sincerely sorry for any confusion caused," the company's managing director Paul Rose says in newspaper and television advertisements ordered by the commission as part of the penalty.
A similar campaign is being held in neighbouring Australia.
In the advertisements, Rose admits the company claimed its ready-to-drink Ribena products contained a level of vitamin C that was incorrect because "the testing method used to determine the level of vitamin C was unreliable and we were unaware of that at the time."
The company had also claimed that blackcurrants in Ribena contained four times the vitamin C of oranges. "This may have misled you to believe that Ribena contains four times the level of vitamin C than in the same quantity of orange juice. That was never our intention and is incorrect."
Rose says Ribena's syrup concentrate "has always been and continues to be a rich source of vitamin C", but adds, "To ensure the accuracy of our vitamin C claims in the future, we are in the process of working to reformulate our ready-to-drink products.
"We are also changing our testing methods to ensure this can never happen again."
GlaxoSmithKline's Australian managing director, John Sayers, said, "We know we have got a lot of work to do if we hope to rebuild consumer trust in this brand."
