Taiwan’s Third-Largest Health Food Company Bans Animal Tests After PETA Push

Group Urges Uni-President to Follow Suit

For Immediate Release:
July 26, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

After talks with PETA and Kindness to Animals (KiTA) in Taiwan, Vitalon Foods Group—the third-largest health food company in Taiwan and the maker of Super Supau, Taiwan’s best-selling brand of sports drink—banned all animal tests not explicitly required by law.

Vitalon Foods and its subsidiary YEC Biotechnology Co. conducted and/or funded at least 12 animal experiments from 2005 to 2019 that involved at least 1,038 animals, in attempts to make human health claims for marketing products such as green tea and royal jelly. After hearing from PETA and KiTA, Vitalon Foods has established a new policy stating, “Vitalon Foods Group while adapting to international scientific and animal welfare trends will not conduct, sponsor, or entrust/outsource to third-parties to conduct animal testing unless expressly required by regulations.”

“No animals should be bled, sickened, and killed in cruel and unreliable tests simply to try to establish health claims for marketing foods and beverages,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “Vitalon Foods’ kind decision to ban these tests on animals will help PETA push other Taiwanese food-industry experiments in a more effective, ethical, economical, animal-free direction.”

PETA has written to 20 health food companies in Taiwan—including its largest food and beverage conglomerate, Uni-President Enterprises Corp., and Nestlé licensee AGV Products Corp.—calling on them to end needless animal experiments that have entailed force-feeding, electroshocking, drowning, starving, bleeding, poisoning, dissecting, and/or killing more than 8,000 animals over the past two decades. Vitalon Foods now joins Standard Foods Group—the largest health food company in Taiwan—in banning such tests, none of which are required by law.

After pressure from PETA, the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) adopted two major reforms: First, it removed horrific drowning and electroshock tests on animals from the regulation concerning companies attempting to make anti-fatigue health claims for marketing their products, and second, it updated its safety-testing regulation for foods, which will now prioritize “non-animal test methods that are internationally recognized.” PETA and more than 96,000 people are now calling on the TFDA to ban animal tests for a separate joint-protection health claim for marketing foods and beverages.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.