Hey, I am an environmentally friendly product!

Recently, the popularity of plant-based milk has dramatically increased as more people look for non-dairy or sustainable alternatives. The industry has changed as more brands seek to offer products that are environmentally friendly. As a result of the increased importance of environmentally friendly practices, green marketing has greatly increased worldwide. There is, however, a divide between the green marketing strategies utilized by brands and the actual disclosure of the product's benefits to the environment. The goal of this study is to provide more information on the packaging strategies employed by plant-based milk brands to clearly demonstrate their brand values. Therefore, this paper will dive deeper into how plant-based milk brands utilize explicit and implicit cues on packaging to communicate environmentally friendliness. The study will examine 100 packages and focus on the design elements and approaches to communication used by these brands to communicate ideals. To guarantee that this study covers all the consumer touchpoints where plant-based milk brands are encountered by consumers, 100 plant-based milk packages were gathered from organic and major supermarkets in The Netherlands. Moreover, this study employs a multimodal discourse analysis and thematic qualitative analysis. By using multimodal discourse analysis, it provides an in-depth understanding of the themes in relation to their sociocultural, political, and historical context. It was found that plant-based milk brands are communicative about the health benefits of the products and make comparisons based on conventional dairy milk. Moreover, plant-based milk brands heavily rely on environmental labels and divert from using visual cues and will use visual cues from time to time as a supporting element to other cues. An emerging trend for plant-based milk brands is to adopt QR codes on their packaging to show a transparent supply chain as consumers can follow along the manufacturing and selecting sources journey. In the context of EU and Dutch laws, it came to light that plant-based milk brands are ambiguous about partnering with NGOs. As a result, legislators should pay attention and pass rules requiring brands to be more transparent in their communications, particularly when it comes to giving a specific percentage of their profits to charity.