Masterfoods starts to back down...

A big thank you to all those people that signed the petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/MarsWhey/petition.html), made the petition appear on the frontpage of petition online (http://www.petitiononline.com/), phoned up Masterfoods on 0800 952 1234 and spread the news of the terrible decision from Masterfoods, helping this to achieve national and even international coverage!

Details of this back-down can be seen on the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6673549.stm

and on Sky:
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1266578,00.html

and MSN:
http://news.uk.msn.com/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=4976226

The BBC are also running a 'Have your Say' section about this decision here:
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=6385&&edition=1&ttl=20070520132240

However not to get too carried away the BBC said 'The firm had said it would change the whey used in some of its products from a vegetarian source to one with traces of the animal enzyme, rennet'. However which products it will change the ingredients in is unknown at the moment, and i'm sure there are a few people out there who have no idea which chocolates they can eat right now.

Please note that I still have a back-log of e-mail to get through in my inbox, so apologies if I have not replied to you yet. Many people have made the comment that this could be a PR stunt, but as for me personally - I will keep quiet for the time being, but being a student of Marketing this is what I would now expect Masterfoods to have to do. Quite why they made the decision in the first place to use the non-veggie whey without consulting the public though goes against my Marketing brain.

Thanks again to everyone who contacted Mars, and let this be a warning to all other companies who want to save their costs over serving their Customers.