A beautiful concept built on ugly discriminatory words
Around October 2020, an advertisement from the company popped up in Sweden with big bold letters "No meat, no egg, no Chinese Investors, no gluten". Soon the company suffered a big backlash on social media for promoting racial/national discrimination through generalisation, implying all Chinese investors are bad with no reasoning just because they are Chinese.
The backlash covered mainly on their Facebook page, and their rating dropped all the way to 1.8/5 with countless people from Sweden and around condemning it's racist remarks, particularly but not solely the Swedish Chinese community. Many used the hashtags "#racism is #pandemic" in their reviews, the amount span multiple pages.
Soon the reviews are deleted, which Peas of Heaven claimed to be automatically done by Facebook, and they wanted to recover them back. However, there are many doubts about their claim as it's said that they had to actively report to Facebook for this to happen, and all comments of slight negative tone have been removed even if they were peaceful comments regarding the advertisement.
The deletion of comments continues and soon they have shifted the answer from they "want to recover them to answer them one by one" to the comments "were threatening their lives and against the Facebook guidelines" which at the time of writing this review, there is no way to verify as the reviews, as well as reviews including the screenshots, have all been removed.
With that, the company released a press release post on their page apologising for what has offended people, and explaining the reason why they wrote that being that they do not want money from investors of states that has no human rights.
Many appreciated the acknowledgement of the issue, however, were unsatisfied with their explanation. Many continued to condemn the act, as even their press release was generalising and stereotyping all Chinese, implying that all Chinese people are against human rights which is simply absurd. One had made an equally absurd analogy as such: imagining making a real estate advert of saying the neighbourhood they are selling has "no noise, no pollution, no black people". It is simply the wrong thing to say.
My reviews, which are as peaceful as this one has been removed multiple time, including my comment to the release post explaining why their press release showed little understanding of what they have said. It was the top comment before deletion. Now I am also banned from interacting with the page through reacting or commenting. I have reached out for comment from them through private messaging and have yet gotten a reply.
As of now, they seem to be continuing the censorship of negative comments in their press release post. And the review section is often barred from people adding new reviews. However the rating has remained to be 1.8/5
Sadly I think they do have beautiful products, but personally, I will NOT, and strongly urge everyone NOT to, support business with toxicity like this.