71–80 of 605 posts
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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.
This seems like splitting hairs on the part of the FDA. FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.” Bimbo officials have until July 8 to identify steps taken to remedy the issue — or to explain why the labeling doesn't violate FDA standards. So a baker.. who adds (insert allergy ingredient here), in minute quantit…
This is about sesame. Last year or so, the FDA changed the rules about sesame as an allergen. Some bakeries then decided to just slap "may contain traces of sesame" on everything so they didn't have to pay the cost of actually ensuring there's no cross-contamination. This has significantly harmed consumers who are actually allergic to sesame. Now there's effectively no way to know if a baked product will actually con…
My view is that the business should be able to decide who they want to service or not. According to recent US studies, 0.2% of the population have a noticeable allergy to sesame. Seems like bakeries don't want to invest money for such a small percentage. It sucks but this opens the door for new bakeries to cater towards those with this specific allergy. Why does the government need to force business to do it?
FWIW 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 )
Are those those the only brands they produce? I only recognize 3 of those brands, and I can't even be sure I've ever eaten more than one of those. Maybe they are big only in certain regions?
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Why are some of their brands just pictures of sandwiches?
Whatever the 7th row, 4th column is, it does not look appetizing.
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“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 a…
Honestly, I side with the companies on this one. It's just a matter of incentives - if the consequence of "getting it wrong" (i.e. saying a product is free of an allergen but then through some chance of cross-contamination that it ends up killing somebody) are enormous, I think it's hard to fault a company that then decides to explicitly add nuts, sesame, etc. to a product and explicitly state "You should not eat this if you have allergies."
More to your point, though, when you say "Which is one reason why some people will be tempted to roll the dice and end up dead or in the ER", I think that's huge hyperbole. Every single person I've ever known that has a severe allergy never "rolls the dice", and on the contrary they are extremely diligent about double checking that what they eat is allergen free. On the flip side, I've known people that have mild allergies to products (e.g. symptoms are on the level of lactose intolerance) who don't worry about avoiding trace amounts of allergens. Why conflate these 2 cases? I have certainly never known actual people with these differing levels of allergies to confuse their issues.
FWIW 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?
If they kept it with 31 there'd be empty space at any reasonable column count (2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Past 4-6 columns it starts getting too busy across the screen (subjective). They seem to have capped it at 4, it drops to 2 and then 1 as you narrow the page.
One filler image works at each of those sizes, but then it's odd to have a single filler image. Pushing it to 9 gives a ratio approaching 3:1 brand:filler images, someone looked at that and said "That looks better". The filler images are placed, it appears, next to their associated brand (the cupcakes and Sara Lee, as an example).
I 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".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is about sesame. Last year or so, the FDA changed the rules about sesame as an allergen. Some bakeries then decided to just slap "may contain traces of sesame" on everything so they didn't have to pay the cost of actually ensuring there's no cross-contamination. This has significantly harmed consumers who are actually allergic to sesame. Now there's effectively no way to know if a baked product will actually con…
> It was a clear and flagrant abuse of the "may contain traces" mechanism. The bakeries caused harm for consumers as a way to avoid the coats of doing business safely. My view is that the business should be able to decide who they want to service or not. According to recent US studies, 0.2% of the population have a noticeable allergy to sesame. Seems like bakeries don't want to invest money for such a small percentag…
At that point, the usefulness of requiring the labels to begin with is considerably diminished. Having a cottage industry of "actually correctly labeled" foods because the standard labels are poorly enforced seems inefficient, IMHO.
[0]https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/facts-and-statistics