Usually, the makers and marketers of “meat”-based foodstuffs attempt to remove the finished product from its live animal origins as much as possible; by dismembering, reconstructing and altering animal corpses, then, butchers make it easier for consumers to conveniently “forget” that they’re consuming formerly sentient creatures.

Not Royco! Nope, they want you to know that those chicken and “beef” bouillon cubes are the real thing, baby! Whereas most people see an innocuous, flavorful cube of powder when they unwrap a bouillon, Royco makes it clear that there’s really a live (dead) animal buried within those indistinguishable powder particles.

First, their chicken bouillon:

And then the “beef”:

The ads picture a Royco bouillon cube box, opened on top to reveal first a chicken, then a cow, each neatly wrapped in a sheet of silver tinfoil. The foil sheets, too, are partially pulled back, revealing their smiling captives. Well, the cow is flashing an eerie, Suicide Food-like smile; it’s hard to read the chicken, since he doesn’t have lips and I’m not very well-versed in chicken body language.

When viewed side-by-side, the ads are especially disconcerting; though the boxes are identical, they’re filled to capacity by two animals of completely different sizes and masses. Did Royco work some bioscience mojo and shrink the chicken and cow down to bouillon size?

Even more troubling is the complete lack of a vegetable bouillon option. Upon first seeing these ads, I immediately thought that I Believe in Advertising must have lost or overlooked a third version, one for the veggie bouillon. Not so. Over on Royco’s website, you can see that they *only* make chicken and beef versions of their “FDS Powder.” This despite their claims of “Spreading Goodness” by “promot[ing] healthy ingredients and dishes.”

Listen, now. Vegetable bouillon works just as well as the cruelty-laden ones, particularly with hearty soups. So, like, WTF!?

Then again, Royce (an Indonesian company) is owned by Unilever, so perhaps I shouldn’t be all that surprised.

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare marketing speciesist speciesism meat bouillon unilever royco chicken beef cow flickr photos advertisement ads soup food veggie

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Marketing, Photo Blogging, Speciesist Ads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.