Product idea: Allergen slurry. A tasteless/colorless paste containing all known allergens. Put a tiny drop in every batch of product (or at least claim to) and you can slap on an omni-label dissuading anyone and everyone who has even seen an allergist.
FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
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Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#52FWIW Bimbo (a Mexican company) is the largest baking company in north america -- when you go to the typical grocery store almost all the baked goods will be from Bimbo regardless of the label ( https://bimbobakeriesusa.com/our-brands )
Why are some of their brands just pictures of sandwiches?
Whatever the 7th row, 4th column is, it does not look appetizing.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it says it on the label, and you're allergic to it, then you shouldn't eat it. This doesn't harm consumers at all.
It does harm consumers by severely limiting their choices, especially if companies start putting the warning on every product by default, instead of actually making reasonable effort to prevent contamination.
You couldn't write a more perfect allegory for what has already happened due to California's Proposition 65. The common denominator here is that the government gives companies new rules to follow, and enforces severe penalties for breaking them, and so the companies minimized their risk by following them to the extreme.
It's almost like if you want a different outcome, the government agencies involved need to step up and do a more thoughtful job of architecting these policies in a way where the companies are forced to follow the "spirit" of them.
I can't be mad if I create a policy, and someone follows it. My intention should have been in the policy, not just implied.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#54At this point it seems like it might be more effective to mandate the opposite: labels that indicate that the product is allergen free for X class of allergen. That way the default (no label) = might contain allergens, and the presence of the label guarantees your safety. Companies that take allergen cross contamination seriously can tout the label (and win the business of the allergic), companies that don't won't re…
This makes sense from a practical standpoint, but from a litigative standpoint not having the warning label on those products with allergens exposes the company to liability. I also suspect that if there is an incident, this company might be able to have the government found liable for preventing it from warning customers.
the government found liable for preventing it from warning customers.
Very interesting idea. I wonder if there is a similar situation in which the government prevented a company from alerting customers to something.
The only thing I can come up with is FISA warrants.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly the kind of thing the FDA has a problem with: > "Because it can be difficult and expensive to keep sesame in one part of a baking plant out of another, some companies began adding small amounts of sesame to products that didn't previously contain the ingredient to avoid liability and cost. FDA officials said that violated the spirit, but not the letter, of federal regulations." It seems that they prefer the "…
“May contain“ often refers to cross-contamination. For some people small amounts of allergens will not cause a problem.
Which is one reason why some people will be tempted to roll the dice and end up dead or in the ER. It's much better to just know if something is in your food that will kill you. It doesn't help that repeated exposure to an allergen can cause a person's sensitivity to that allergen and the severity of their reaction to increase.
Companies who want to sell their products to people with allergies should be required to actually spend the time and money to be reasonably sure that their products won't kill them. Instead companies want to be able to avoid that expense and just slap on a "Probably safe, but who knows?" label and hope that people with allergies will just buy the product and take their chances.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#56It's may favorite example of unintended consequences. FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen. So? Bakers claim their product contains allergens, even if they don't. FDA doesn't like it. So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them.
California proposition 65 is the classic example. Since it requires buildings to warn visitors if they contain cancer-causing substances, and since no landlord can possibly know every substance that even tenant or visitor might have, every building has a "this building may or may not contain cancer-causing substances" placard. It's surreal and awesome.
The problems with Prop 65 go beyond that. The legislation itself effectively made no attempt to define what it means for something to cause cancer. The commission put in charge of enforcement ultimately decided it would mean anything that current scientific evidence suggests has a 1 in 100,000 risk of eventually causing cancer if you are exposed to it for an entire lifetime. Subsequent lawsuits clarified that a substance must be included even if the risk is only proven to exist in non-human animals.
Ironically, I never even knew this, but apparently the proposition only exists because Jane Fonda thought it would draw left-leaning voters to the polls to hopefully vote for Tom Bradley over George Deukmejian in the 1986 race for California governor. She and the other proponents didn't even think the proposition itself would pass. But the proposition did pass and Bradley wasn't even elected!
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#57I used to work in a cookie factory, we often made products for private brands and in some recipes we purposefully added eggs so that it would appear as an ingredient and not "may contain traces of".
Any other interesting tidbits from working in a cookie factory? I'm genuinely curious.
if you must know, there is a policy to handle cookies. There is also a manager for all the cookies. This manager tracks all the cookie handlers. The cookies themselves are stored in a cookie store. While legend has it Arthur Van Hoff designed this whole setup, if you look closely in java.net, the author of CookiePolicy, CookieHandler, CookieManager and CookieStore is actually Edward Wang. Anyways it is not important. Since one cannot maintain a session without session cookie, effectively the entire human population on the internet works in the cookie factory.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#58At this point it seems like it might be more effective to mandate the opposite: labels that indicate that the product is allergen free for X class of allergen. That way the default (no label) = might contain allergens, and the presence of the label guarantees your safety. Companies that take allergen cross contamination seriously can tout the label (and win the business of the allergic), companies that don't won't re…
This makes sense from a practical standpoint, but from a litigative standpoint not having the warning label on those products with allergens exposes the company to liability. I also suspect that if there is an incident, this company might be able to have the government found liable for preventing it from warning customers.
Seems to have worked for gluten, at least. i.e. Consumers look for "gluten free" labelling rather than "This product contains gluten" labelling.
If I were the FDA I'd standardize the nutrition label to have a clearly labelled allergen section in which you can reliably use to check that the product is free of X allergen. Of course a naive implementation of this would mean that water bottles and stuff will have a big long list of "gluten free, peanut free, dairy free" so it probably requires a bit more thought.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#59It's may favorite example of unintended consequences. FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen. So? Bakers claim their product contains allergens, even if they don't. FDA doesn't like it. So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them.
It's closer to: FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen. So? Bakers look at their production processes and determine there's a chance that enough allergens get into the product due to cross contamination to list it on the label, just in case. FDA doesn't like it. They expect the bakers to fix their cross-contamination issues at great expense to…
So? Congress passes "CAFE" style standards requiring that every large bakery offer a fraction of their SKUs as allergen-feee variation, or pay a "cap and trade" fee to a baker who does.
Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes sense from a practical standpoint, but from a litigative standpoint not having the warning label on those products with allergens exposes the company to liability. I also suspect that if there is an incident, this company might be able to have the government found liable for preventing it from warning customers.
Seems to have worked for gluten, at least. i.e. Consumers look for "gluten free" labelling rather than "This product contains gluten" labelling. If I were the FDA I'd standardize the nutrition label to have a clearly labelled allergen section in which you can reliably use to check that the product is free of X allergen. Of course a naive implementation of this would mean that water bottles and stuff will have a big l…
It's fine to have such long lists because the alternative is more complicated rules that might even be subjective. Clarity from subjectivity or mistakes with complicated rules is more important when safety is at risk than having less text on a label.