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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

#251

Post by throwup238 »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #180
NaOH wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren’t food prep areas when it comes to manufacturing at this scale. There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production, and large-scale machinery which is designed to minimize exposure to the environment and people while in use. That’s putting aside the equipment and facilities used to acquire ingredients or store products after production. Yes, all o…

Thank you for the mental image of a loaf of bread getting busted trying to smuggle a machine part out of the factory.

You joke but product theft is always a major concern.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#252

Post by isoprophlex »

jjallen wrote: post #247
betaby wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That market is too small to target. Overregulation is affecting consumer choices.

It’s over regulation to everyone who doesn’t have sesame allergies. It’s lifesaving to those that do. Somehow bakeries in Switzerland are doing just fine with sesame being a declared allergen and keeping them separate but American ones just can’t be bothered to handle a life threatening ingredient thoroughly carefully.

A life-threatening allergy is fine and all but will someone please think of the profit margins?!

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#253

Post by isoprophlex »

NaOH wrote: post #148
forgetfreeman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, this seems like a pretty bullshit argument on the part of manufacturers though. My expectation for a food prep area is that I should be able to safely eat off of any surface. This level of cleanliness should eliminate any contaminants from the environment bigger than airborne dust and given how relatively cheap air filtration equipment is a case could be made there as well. In any case sesame seeds are a hell of…

There aren’t food prep areas when it comes to manufacturing at this scale. There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production, and large-scale machinery which is designed to minimize exposure to the environment and people while in use. That’s putting aside the equipment and facilities used to acquire ingredients or store products after production. Yes, all o…

> These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts.

And looking at the picture of the """bread""" at the start of the article, it shows.

That's not bread, that's an industrial product.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#254

Post by kgwgk »

bsder wrote: post #248
kgwgk wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will be measuring the sesame that they are adding as an ingredient. That's on top of whatever unmeasured amount of sesame was already present due to contamination.

The manufacturer will dial the measured sesame so that it will be large enough that "cross contamination" will be a rounding error. It's fairly easy to get something below a reasonable threshold--run a batch or two without the contaminant and throw them out. After that, the background levels will be below the added ingredient measurement.

> The manufacturer will dial the measured sesame so that it will be large enough that "cross contamination" will be a rounding error.

Sure, the "completely uncontrolled" amount present before - in the "may contain sesame" situation where it was not added as an ingredient - was a rounding error. That's why if you can buy the product now you also could do it before.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#255

Post by Ekaros »

infecto wrote: post #143
forgetfreeman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, this seems like a pretty bullshit argument on the part of manufacturers though. My expectation for a food prep area is that I should be able to safely eat off of any surface. This level of cleanliness should eliminate any contaminants from the environment bigger than airborne dust and given how relatively cheap air filtration equipment is a case could be made there as well. In any case sesame seeds are a hell of…

I know its easy to blame the manufacturers but I don't believe they are entirely at fault here. Its not so much the size alone but that in these facilities they are not being cleaned after every run. Certainly the products that spoil are getting sanitize appropriately (eggs, dairy etc) but uncooked grains I suspect have a much larger time line for cleaning.

Lot of these things are dry ingredients. So they do not even need same level of standards as anything wet. They keep well enough and earlier in manufacturing chain things are much worse. Just think all of the places your average wheat grain go trough from field to finally being baked... Many parts do not have the strictest standards of steam cleaned stainless steel...

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#256

Post by Ekaros »

Tomte wrote: post #239
ASalazarMX wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Mexican, I'm still salty with Bimbo because I went to Spain, and they sold there better, bigger Bimbo-brand sliced bread than here, including varieties without crust. It takes guts to keep the brand name in English-speaking contries, though. > The name was formed as the combination of the Disney Bambi and Dumbo films names, which were the favourite movies of Marinela, Lorenzo Servitje's daughter. Later, the foun…

And in German, Bimbo is a very racist and insulting word for people with darker skin. Pretty close to the n-word in America.

In Finland it is insult, mostly for mentally crazy woman... Think of the not exactly bright blond women in tv shows and like.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#257

Post by throwup238 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #217
lisper wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my child ingests sesame, they go into anaphylactic shock and without an epipen administered in minutes they will die. Please excuse my skepticism, I am asking this out of a genuine desire to become better informed: how can you possibly know this? Unless you happened to have an epi-pen handy the first time your kid ever ate a sesame seed, which seems unlikely, then if this were true would not your kid have died t…

Good question. The idea that coming into contact with a seed could kill you seems insane and terrible. Yet where are all the people dying of this? Is the implication that our prevention is so good we are somehow avoiding it? I'm also skeptical. I'm not denying that it exists, but common knowledge (you literally can't eat peanut butter at school) indicates it's so common. How could this be? The solution is to stock ep…

> Yet where are all the people dying of this?

Based on this metastudy titled Epidemiology of anaphylaxis in Europe, they found the prognosis was:

> Case fatality rates were noted in three studies at 0.000002%, 0.00009%, and 0.0001%.

That's among all cases of anaphylaxis, so the answer is "they are almost nonexistent". It's not even a rounding error. Something on the order of a few dozen people per year for a country the size of the UK and from what I can tell, most of those are due to administration of IV medication where the allergy was previously unknown and much more severe.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/all.12272

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#258

Post by treflop »

mc32 wrote: post #154
lpolovets wrote: post #117

My understanding is this allergen over-labeling was inspired by the FDA in the first place. https://www.fastcompany.com/90830854/sesame-seed-allergen-fd... From the linked article (from Jan 2023): But sesame does differ in one distinct way from eggs, peanuts, shellfish, milk, and soy: The seeds are teeny tiny and hard to keep track of. This means they’re prone to “cross-contamination,” in food-allergy terms. If you o…

This feels like it’s going the way of prop 65. To be on the safe side, everything gets the label, thus making the label pointless -it no longer helps differentiating things.

I don’t think prop 65 is super useful but I don’t get why people think it’s meaningless.

I’ve definitely seen prop 65 on things that made me pause because nothing about the object (like a food bowl) should give me cancer and often I won’t buy it.

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#259

Post by kgwgk »

Tomte wrote: post #239
ASalazarMX wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Mexican, I'm still salty with Bimbo because I went to Spain, and they sold there better, bigger Bimbo-brand sliced bread than here, including varieties without crust. It takes guts to keep the brand name in English-speaking contries, though. > The name was formed as the combination of the Disney Bambi and Dumbo films names, which were the favourite movies of Marinela, Lorenzo Servitje's daughter. Later, the foun…

And in German, Bimbo is a very racist and insulting word for people with darker skin. Pretty close to the n-word in America.

Swiss court bans ‘racist’ Mexican food brand ‘Bimbo’

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multinational-companies/swiss-c...

Re: FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

#260

Post by morsch »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #128
starttoaster wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only way to fix cross-contamination issues is to have a different production facility for every possible combination of allergens. Which is insane. I worked in a factory that packaged food, if one product contained an allergen, there was no way you could guarantee that a tiny amount of that allergen wouldn't get into some amount of the next product on that production line. No way. Not any possible way. You can cl…

It's hilarious to me that it's just a given that bread is made in a factory-like setting as opposed to an actual bakery. They still exist, and some of them just make plain bread, which means they don't handle nuts. I'm sure their product is more expensive, but it's not clean room, vacuum chamber expensive.

An ecosystem of centralized, mass production of baked goods is part of the problem, at least.

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