The world needs more Spencer Sheehan's. What a hero.
The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's obvious at all. "Smokehouse" can simply refer to an added smokey flavor. I don't think it's _necessarily_ implied that their product _has_ to be smoked according to any particular method, or it's falsely advertised. 11 lawsuits for that?
Would you be as accepting of I sold an "organic peaches" flavored product because it was the same flavor as organic peaches?
If you didn't use the word organic, sure. In food, the word "organic" has a specific legal meaning:
> "Any product labeled as organic on the product description or packaging must be USDA certified"
A synthetic peach flavoring would almost certainly be unable to attain this sort of certification.
But calling a peach-flavored product "peach" is as old as the hills, and of course I'm okay with it.
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#23A long time ago, I used to work for a design studio in my country (Mexico). A client asked for the packaging design for a new product made from beef. When we asked him for the Nutrition Facts table and the ingredient list, he gave us the packaging of a similar product from the competition and simply told us: Just write the same thing. I stopped working with them around the time (for another reasons). I later saw the new packaging: it had the same information. Some months later it was updated. I dont know if the new labels were real this time.
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Oh no, I was tricked by this picture of an olive on the packaging! It's not entirely olive oil based after all! This calls for a major class action lawsuit." How about you quote from either the article or the court case. Its entirely reasonable to assume that a product that contains in its name "with Olive Oil" contains Olive Oil. The fact that it doesn't to me is _Fraud_; the company is attempting to get revenue…
> What he saw was Country Crock Plant Butter Made with Olive Oil, a product with a green lid and a label showing a leafy olive branch floating above a buttered slice of toast, with the words “New!” and “Dairy Free” in delighted-looking cursive. “Most margarines, they don’t put pictures of the ingredients,” Clemmons went on. > Reading, he made a startling discovery: the spread wasn’t made of olive oil, or even mostly…
If I write an application in 20,000 lines of PHP, and there's 200 lines of JavaScript in some service is it sensible to say "written in JavaScript" on the product page without mentioning PHP at all?
If I host the backend for that application on a bunch of Windows servers, but there's one server running that JavaScript service that's hosted on FreeBSD, and I advertise the product as "hosted on FreeBSD", is that sensible?
You seem to be clutching at straws to prove your point so I'm not sure that it's even helpful to engage with you, but "X is made with Y" when X is something that could be made entirely with Y implies that X is made entirely/almost entirely with Y. Not "we put a tiny bit of Y in so that we can say it's made with Y on the label" - which is exactly what happened here. It's intentionally misleading.
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#25On the one hand, it's hugely impressive that someone would take it upon themselves to demand honest marketing. On the other, it seems like a dreadful failure of regulation.
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#26Does anyone know where to find a list of common food labeling Gimmicks?
Not a very comprehensive list, but Mr. Sheehan's website has some information.
a quote from [1] :
'Food fraud can take place in many forms. A company might substitute one product for another, use additives or enhancements that are not approved or misrepresent the country of origin of the product. Stolen food shipments or intentional contamination of the product is also considered food fraud.
Food fraud is a continuum of deception. At one end of spectrum, there is the deliberate substitution of inferior and potentially harmful ingredients. At the other end is the mislabeling of common products by the largest food companies. The largest food companies will not engage in outright food fraud intentionally by using different ingredients that could be harmful. Instead, they typically would engage in a more subtle deception – all natural claims, no preservatives, healthy, yet containing lots of chemicals, etc.'
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What he saw was Country Crock Plant Butter Made with Olive Oil, a product with a green lid and a label showing a leafy olive branch floating above a buttered slice of toast, with the words “New!” and “Dairy Free” in delighted-looking cursive. “Most margarines, they don’t put pictures of the ingredients,” Clemmons went on. > Reading, he made a startling discovery: the spread wasn’t made of olive oil, or even mostly…
If I write an application in 20,000 lines of PHP, and there's 200 lines of JavaScript in some service is it sensible to say "written in JavaScript" on the product page without mentioning PHP at all? If I host the backend for that application on a bunch of Windows servers, but there's one server running that JavaScript service that's hosted on FreeBSD, and I advertise the product as "hosted on FreeBSD", is that sensib…
You neglect to consider the fact that all food products have nutrition labels, which are written according to certain standards and legal conventions.
Could be that this company added some olive oil to their "plant spread" and wanted to visually distinguish this type from their alternative olive-free version. In any case, all nutrition facts are on the label -- the label clearly shows that the product is made of an oil blend -- and, as such, the picture of an olive on the packaging can hardly be "intentionally misleading" for more than about five seconds.
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#28[flagged]
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#29Great article.
In Australia we have the ACCC as our consumer protection body, which does great work in this space. When I travel overseas I'm marveled by the lack of standardisation of ingredient and nutritional information presented in other countries.
It sounds like in lieu of a strong consumer protection body the US falls to random lawyers like this to keep industry players in line. This mechanism doesn't seem to work at all.
Re: The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
#30On the one hand, it's hugely impressive that someone would take it upon themselves to demand honest marketing. On the other, it seems like a dreadful failure of regulation.
This is what I think of whenever companies talk of the harms and overuse of class action lawsuits.
We’ve decided on the approach of replacing real regulation with class action lawsuits. And if that’s the case, I’m damn glad there are people holding the manufacturers feet to the fire (or the lack of fire, in the case of Bkue Diamond).
I’d be happy to replace this whole system with some real, effective regulation. But until that day, I’m very skeptical of anyone who wants to get rid of class action lawsuits.