Lotus Bakeries Hits Cereal Start-up Holie’s With Lawsuit

Trek snack bars connected waste successful Amsterdam, The Netherlands connected 7 February 2025. Credit: Dutchmen Photography/Shutterstock.com

Lotus Bakeries, nan Belgian snacks major, has taken Dutch cereal start-up Holie’s to tribunal successful an advertizing spat.

The proprietor of nan Nakd and Trek brands has taken objection to advertizing from Holie’s that highlights nan levels of sweetener successful cereals and snack bars.

Holie’s has devised a “sugar score” that ranks products pinch a people of A to C based connected nan sweetener contented listed connected packaging.

A stands for products containing 0-5% sugar, B for 5-10% and C for much than 10% sugar.

The Holie’s run highlights brands including Nakd and Trek.

Holie’s acknowleged nan people is “not an charismatic nutrition label” but described nan ranking arsenic “our ain inaugural to thief you make much conscious nutrient choices”.

The institution added: “We’ve selected nan apical 5 best-selling supermarket cereals and barroom products from each A-brand successful nan Netherlands and Belgium, based connected 2025 NielsenIQ data. Then we rated them each utilizing Holie’s Sugar-Score.”

A preliminary proceeding took spot successful Amsterdam past week. According to Lotus, Holie’s is engaging successful misleading comparative advertizing and has breached trading regulations.

Lotus expects a verdict to beryllium announced later this month. “Holie’s self-created sweetener people looks only astatine full sweetener content, representing this arsenic sweetener cubes, without distinguishing betwixt sugars that are people occurring and added sugars. That is misleading,” nan institution said. “It besides ignores different important nutritional factors for illustration fibre and protein, which creates a skewed image for nan consumer.”

Amsterdam-based Holie’s was group up by Merick Schoute and Valentijn van Santvoort successful nan Netherlands successful 2018.

Holie’s markets cereals it deems are healthier than different competitors successful nan sector, being free from added sugars and sweeteners and precocious successful macromolecule and fibre.

The business added: “A merchandise that contains 5g of sweetener per 100g aliases little (0–5% sugar) is officially classified arsenic ‘low successful sugar.’ Therefore, this was a reasonable and honorable scope for nan A classification. Logically, B past covered 5–10%, and C, 10% aliases more.”

The institution has much than 20 SKUs sold successful unit successful nan Netherlands and Belgium and booked €13.4m ($14m) successful yearly gross for 2024.

In January, nan group launched successful nan UK marketplace done online retailer Ocado.