Smuckers' Strawberry Jam Is Mostly Sugar, Thanks to a Legal Labeling Trick
Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed first
American food companies use a legal technique called 'ingredient splitting' to make products appear to contain more of a desirable ingredient than they do. Smuckers lists strawberries first on its label, but the sweeteners are split into three separate ingredients, each weighing less, so the fruit outranks them. The FDA allows this, and the post names ten other popular foods using the same tactic.
This is a scam. It’s outright manipulation of our system and lying to customers.
- WarmWash
I think even worse than this is the disconnect between a product name and the actual composition of the product.
Its most rampant with juices, where every juice is actually just apple juice (from concentrate, so mostly water anyway) with a splash of [fruit] juice thrown in (also from concentrate, so also mostly water). Maybe if you are lucky you'll catch an apple shown on the front label behind the huge passion fruit or whatever.
This even extends to clothing, where stuff like "Wool Sweater" is 5% wool 15% cotton and 80% polyester.
It should be a law that the primary ingredient of a product being the leading noun in the name of the product.
- gumby
I remember looking at a carton of Whole Foods soy milk that prominently said “no added sugar”.
I looked on the back and after water the second ingredient was “dehydrated cane juice”.
The food system has been gamed forever.
- crazygringo
It's not a scam. And added sugars are listed prominently in the nutrition facts.
It's the fact that different sugars have different properties. In terms of texture, moisture, etc. And they can be used at different stages of the manufacturing process.
There's nothing wrong with this. Nutrition facts clearly label the total added sugars.
Plus, strawberries are often going to be listed first anyways because traditional jam is approximately a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar. So even if it were just one type of sugar, strawberries could still be listed first.
- yummypaint
Simply adopting reasonable labeling rules proven in other countries would fix a lot of problems in general. Japan has a great system for beverages. It wouldn't hurt if we adopted their safety standards around eggs either. https://xn--btro1dr1yrpow7m.com/en/what-are-the-rules-for-ju...
- montag
Prefixing the title with “The” would make it a lot easier to parse.