Legal risk management in online sales of food and wine

The sale and marketing of food and wine products is associated with the same types of legalissues as the sale and marketing of any other product. Australian law, like the law in mostcountries, contains detailed provisions dealing with consumer contracts, as well as contracts ingeneral. Sales result in tax obligations, product liability rules come into play when something goeswrong post-sale, and marketing laws regulate how the products may be portrayed to the public.Issues such as these are typical of just about all forms of commercial activity.Furthermore, once sales and/or marketing initiatives cross borders additional legal complicationssuch as customs regulations and overlapping competing trademarks may arise. Again, these issuesmanifest themselves in the same way in relation to the sale and marketing of food and wineproducts as they do in the sale and marketing of other products.In a similar vein, we may conclude that the online sale and marketing of food and wine productsbring into play the type of legal issues that are characteristic of all forms of Internet trade, forexample the necessity of complying with data privacy laws and the risk of domain name disputes.Against this background, it would be tempting to conclude that there is little reason to specificallyconsider the topic of legal risk management in online sales of food and wine. Such a conclusionwould, however, be misguided.The sale and marketing of food, and even more so wine, is associated with particularly strictregulation in many countries. As a consequence, once the sale and marketing of food and wineenters the online arena – characterised by a certain ‘borderlessness’ – it is immediately exposed toa particularly complex matrix of overlapping, and in some cases contradictory, legal rules. Thismakes it important to consider legal risk management in online sales of food and wine.