We can’t believe it’s not butter

At the start of December 2024, Arla Foods unveiled an innovative trial involving Bovaer, a feed additive shown to significantly reduce methane emissions from dairy cows. Intended as a breakthrough towards sustainable farming, the announcement unexpectedly sparked an online misinformation campaign. Unfounded fears around food safety and false conspiracy theories involving Bill Gates quickly spread, prompting consumers to wastefully discard Arla products.

In an op-ed for PR Week, Diffusion co-founder Daljit Bhurji argues this incident highlights the dangers of a lack of proactive science communication from Arla, retailers, regulators, and industry bodies. Despite the additive’s regulatory approval since 2020, the absence of a clear, consumer-focused education campaign laying the groundwork allowed conspiracy theorists to dominate the narrative.

With a number of science and technology breakthroughs like gene-edited foods, lab-grown proteins to cleantech, looming over the horizon, the Arla incident should be a wake-up call for science comms.

Explore some of the PR lessons to be learned over at at PR Week.

If you’re a comms professional grappling with how to communicate complex or controversial science and technology, and could use some support, we’d love to help, please drop me a line to connect at ivana.farthing[@]diffusionpr.com.