The 20th century has witnessed the mass production of complicated goods to an extent which could not have been envisaged in its infancy. It is not an overstatement that, today, some goods cannot be used without accompanying instructions,1 and it would be a fair assumption on the part of buyers of such goods that accurate instructions would be provided by the manufacturer or, more rarely, the retailer. As sales of pre-packaged goods have steadily overtaken the sale of goods by weight and generic description, labelling has become a practical necessity as a means of identifying and selling those goods. A sale of unascertained goods by description, as originally defined by the Sale of Goods Act 1893, is now almost exclusively confined to large commercial sales, but packaging is also increasingly popular in that scale of transaction. Warnings as to the correct use of the goods are now common as part of the label and, seemingly, the buyer is frequently assumed to possess a certain degree of technical knowledge as a pre-requisite to understanding the labelling. A concomitant of mass production is mass media advertising by the manufacturer, which, although becoming notorious for the extravagant and ingenious, but contractually ineffective, commendation of goods, has become more precise and detailed in recent years.2 Furthermore, a retailer may expressly or implicitly endorse such advertising in the course of the retail sale.3

In 1962, the Molony Committee4 urged the informative labelling of goods5 in the following terms: