food and beverages

NotMilk Takes Issue With The Way Danone Describes Its Alpro Brand

 

When it comes to brand names, imitation isn’t always the most sincere form of flattery.

A case in point is Chilean food-tech company NotCo, which entered the U.S. market in 2020 with plant-based dairy alternative NotMilk.

The word Not is key to NoCo differentiating the various plant-based products—among them NotMayo, NotIceCream and Not Burger—that the company sells in other countries.

Hence NotCo’s beef with Danone S.A. using the term NOT M LK—with the letter I replaced by a milk droplet—on packaging for its Alpro plant-based beverages, which are sold overseas but have not launched in the United States.

Last week, NotCo posted 100 suggestions for plant-based milk names on Instagram and pointed users to a microsite where they could add more monikers—which now total more than 1,000.

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Then the company sent a truck to Danone North America’s headquarters in New York bearing a billboard with the words “People have spoken. Here are 100 original names for your plant based milks.”

According to NotCo CMO Flavia Buchmann, the campaign is a low-key approach to protecting its reputation. “Consumers get confused when you start to use the same name in different products,” Buchmann tells Marketing Daily.

Four variations of NotMilk are sold online and at some 6,100 U.S. retail outlets.

Founded in 2015, NotCo’s backers include Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions and global investment house The Craftory.

Besides noting that the Alpro brand is not available in the United States, a spokesperson for Danone North America says the company “does not have any additional comments.”

Danone S.A. acquired the Silk and Alpro brands from The WhiteWave Foods Co. in 2017.

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