The Life Cycle of a Media Scandal

In mid-June, stories broke with headlines claiming that Lidl GB ’s Chicken Meat was “Riddled With ‘Life Threatening’ Bacteria.”

In a multinational effort, animal rights activists had commissioned a laboratory in Germany to test Lidl’s own-brand chicken products.

Claiming to have tested 142 products from stores in Germany, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and Poland, they reported a high level of antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’.

This could easily turn into a public relations disaster for Lidl, with BBQ season fast approaching, Lidl’s prominent sponsorship of the UEFA EURO 2024 , and public sentiment generally opposing factory farming.

At Deep, we were interested to see:

How did the story unfold differently across the UK and DE markets?

How did Lidl manage this communication crisis?

In the UK, Open Cages , a non-profit with the stated goal of ridding the world of animal suffering, led the campaign.?

On the 17th of June,?it was The Times ?that first broke the story, followed by Open Cages’s CEO Connor Jackson appearing on LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr.

The story was then picked up by the?Daily Mail, which included Lidl’s response, who said the tests involved just a small sample of raw, uncooked meat tested outside of UK guidelines, and that there was little evidence the chill chain has remained intact throughout shipment.

“Our own testing shows that in the last 12 months there have been no micro-related deviations outside of legal levels, and no concerns have been raised to us by any regulatory bodies on this topic.”

Interestingly, Jackson then posted on Twitter: “All products were tested within 1-2 days of being bought from the shelf, and they were all well within their use-by dates (we have evidence for all of this.) We are in touch with the journalist who has agreed to make a correction.”

We reached out to Jackson, who provided this clarification: “… After seeing our [behind the scenes] evidence, the?journalist then confirmed that corrections we asked for would be made. … We suggested to the journalist that we should have a meeting so we can share more evidence with them, but then we never had a reply back to that. So the corrections were not made, apparently because the journalist did not take us up on our offer of seeing our evidence.”

Over the next few days, other papers picked up the story, including?Metro, the?South Wales Argus, and?Bristol Live.

A new development came on the 21st of June, when it was reported that Lidl was pursuing legal action against Open Cages for its “defamatory” investigation.

In response, Open Cages replied: “This is the first we’ve heard of any legal action. If any further information comes we’ll take a look and consult with our lawyers.”

As of the 19th of June, Open Cages had not heard anything from Lidl or anyone representing them.?

Interestingly, we noticed that?Wales Online?and?Bristol Live?then took down their coverage of the story. Their articles mentioned that “Lidl representatives have been contacted for comment.” It is not clear, but it seems plausible that Lidl requested the stories be taken down, perhaps due to hyperbolic language, such as “damning tests” and “startling results.”

At the time of writing, the story had dropped off DeepPulse’s radar after six days. According to Open Cages, number of media mentions is now nearer to 50 in the UK, along with several articles outside the UK.?

Using our media-monitoring tool DeepPulse, we found that the average sentiment (i.e. the mood or emotional tone of news coverage) of these 10 stories was, at -71 (on a scale of -100 to +100), very negative.

Only 9% of English-language articles about Lidl during this time mentioned the story. Compared to the week leading up to the story breaking, this story brought the total sentiment for Lidl down by -16%.

Let’s now consider how the story played out in Germany. There, the Albert Schweitzer Stiftung für unsere Mitwelt led the campaign.

Lidl in Deutschland 's results were the best of the five countries surveyed, with the fewest contaminated products reported.

DER SPIEGEL broke the story on the 17th of June. Lidl was quite measured in its comments, saying they “currently have no concrete results from the investigation” but emphasising there was no health risk to consumers when poultry is prepared incorrectly.

Interestingly, the next day Lidl published a press release detailing the new steps it was taking to improve animal welfare standards. By 2025, half of its own-label sausages would meet the highest husbandry levels, and by 2030, all of its chilled fresh meat products would meet these levels.

It seems plausible that Lidl timed this press release to follow the ‘superbugs’ scandal, as a way to reframe the narrative.

This would have been possible, in that many animal rights activists try to work behind-the-scenes, only releasing their reports and exposés publicly if they don’t have their corporate demands met. This would have given Lidl time to prepare a response.

Using DeepPulse, we can compare these two narratives. Over the four days the story ran for, in German-language sources ‘superbugs’ received 12 mentions (9% of all ‘Lidl’ mentions), versus 4 mentions for ‘animal welfare’ (3% of all mentions).

The average sentiment of ‘superbugs’ articles was very bad at -78. Compared to the week leading up to the story breaking, this story brought the total sentiment for Lidl down by -11%. This was a better result than in the UK.

Conclusions

Lidl UK and DE had different responses to the ‘superbugs’ stories.

In the UK, Lidl took a more litigious approach, whereas in Germany Lidl looked to get in front of the story and change the narrative.

These different approaches may be due to the different makeups of each market. Lidl DE may have been wary of alienating a market more aware of and concerned with animal welfare.

To this market, legal action may have been seen as excessively heavy handed.

Either way, the high levels of negative sentiment in the ‘superbugs’ articles shows that, from a PR standpoint, Lidl was correct to respond vigorously.

This case study has illustrated how, by providing real-time insights into public sentiment, DeepPulse can empower PR teams to craft timely and effective responses, helping to uphold and protect a brand’s public reputation.

Article updated 22.07 following response from Open Cages CEO Connor Jackson.