Marketing Uncovered: Food Labels

Image credit: Ralf Roletschek

In the latest instalment of Marketing Uncovered articles, I decided to explore some of the ethics around food labelling and advertising claims.

Here, as always, is a run down of my pet hate marketing phrases, together with what I think they really mean.

No added sugar
This just means that the product hasn't been sweetened with sugar. But if it's a sweet product, and it's a processed food (eg. a soft drink), then it has to get its sweetness from somewhere. Sometimes manufacturers use fruit juice concentrate, which is really a sneaky way to use fruit sugar instead of normal sugar. However, for the most part, I find that "no added sugar" usually means "contains artificial sweeteners". Also, because sugar is a natural preservative, removing it can mean that products like soft drinks need stronger artificial preservatives to compensate. So "no added sugar" doesn't necessarily mean "better for you".

Real ingredients
This doesn't necessarily mean you're eating a hand-made product, or one that only uses natural ingredients. Going from the products I've seen using this claim, it currently seems to mean that natural or close to natural ingredients are used. This might include "nature identical" ingredients, for example, a strawberry flavour that is made in a factory, but is almost identical to the natural substance in real strawberries. But as I haven't been able to find an official definition of "real ingredients", it's really anyone's guess as to how tomorrow's products will use this phrase.

85% Fat Free
Regular readers will have already worked this one out. It means that the product contains 15% fat. In other words, when you look at the nutrition information on the back of the pack, you will see that there is 15g of fat per 100g - fairly high. Thankfully, recent industry changes in the UK mean that there are now controls over the use of phrases like "fat free". But it still serves as a useful illustration.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm the one in the supermarket looking at ingredient labels. At least they have tight regulation, and they have to disclose most (but not all) of the contents. I find it a great way to dispel the marketing spin, but only if I have one of those rare ingredients: time!

Image: Bilder im Supermarkt by Ralf Roletschek, CC-BY-SA licence, obtained via Wikimedia Commons.

Positive News

Image: NS Newsflash

As they say, "No news is good news". And I've found that one of the ways to keep a positive outlook is to ignore many of the stories in popular media. I still read newspapers occasionally, but I'm careful which paper I buy. I don't like to start the day on a negative note if I can help it.

A surprising number of friends have adopted the same attitude, saying that many news outlets seem to have a negative tone. And it can be difficult to tell a real news story from marketing and political "spin".

I'd like to share a great example that I encountered last week. We were with some friends in a local pub at the time, when the barman started talking about the news.

He had read in his newspaper that 1 in 5 convicted criminals in the UK are residents of other countries, and the majority of those are from Poland. Someone at the bar overheard. "That's ridiculous", he said, "all those foreigners coming over here to commit crime".

I pointed out that, by the same figures, 80% of convicted criminals are UK residents. And only a fraction of the remainder are Polish nationals.

A few people's eyes widened. "Oh yeah...". There was a sudden realisation that the shocking news story wasn't shocking after all. It was, I suspect, written by someone with a hidden agenda. Now, hopefully, no-one will be suspicious of the Polish customers who wander into the pub. Or the locals who buy imported Polish beer.

This all reminded me of a legendary story from the cold war era, where a car race was organised between two teams, from America and Russia.

The Americans won the race, and the US newspapers reported that the Russians lost. However, the Russian newspapers reported that the Russian team came second, and the American team was next to last.

Both stories look like they have opposite views, but in fact they are presenting the same facts in completely different ways. Just goes to show that there's always another side to the news.

Photo credit: Newspapers B&W (4) by NS Newsflash, CC-BY licence, via Flickr

Quest for new socks

Hand-made re-soleable socks,
without anti-bacterial agents
(not my legs. or my socks.)
credit: krysaia

It's that time again. I've had to throw away a bunch of socks with holes in them. Part of me wonders what happened to darning, which seems something of a lost art. But back to the main topic...

New socks are hard to find in the shops. I'm talking about plain, ordinary socks.

If you've bought any in the past year or so, you may not have noticed that they weren't as plain as you thought. Yes, even the humble sock now comes with anti-bacterial agents and "freshness technology". And it's almost impossible to buy men's socks in the UK without it.

Now, no-one likes smelly feet (well, apart from one of our cats, who seems to be developing a strange fetish for socks that have been through a hard yoga session). But there is becoming no choice whether to have socks with chemically-treated fabrics or not.

Plain, ordinary cotton socks (bless 'em) are a rare species.

The packs don't say what the chemicals are. I might feel better if the manufacturers came clean on the label. And I'm sure this would be welcomed by people with skin allergies.

It seems to me that we've survived for a long time without anti-bacterial socks, even when socks had a longer lifespan (through darning). Do we really need them now?

Photo credit: "Sharks socks redux" by krysaia, licenced under CC-BY-SA licence, via http://www.flickr.com/photos/krysaia/7008399231

Beyond marketing: juice concentrate

When I look at fruit juice labels, I always find the phrases "not from concentrate" or "made with concentrated juice". I often wondered what this meant, and why concentrated juice is usually cheaper.

But is one really better than the other? I did some research, and found that the answer is far from clear cut.

Concentrates start as fresh fruit juice, but some of the water is evaporated. The resulting concentrated juice takes up less space, and uses less energy to transport. If you're shipping orange juice from (let's say) Brazil to Europe, that seems a pretty important consideration. Eventually, when the concentrate arrives at the juice factory, the missing water is added back in and the juice is delivered to the shops.

Juice marked "not from concentrate" doesn't go through this process. This makes it sound fresher, because it's squeezed closer to home. But it does mean that the whole fruit has travelled further, as opposed to just the juice from the fruit - which means more Food Miles.

In terms of nutrients, the government's "five a day" campaign makes no distinction between types of juice - one glass of juice equals one portion of fruit.

Which gives something of a dilemma. Unprocessed and fresh, or fewer food miles: which do you go for?

(Photo credit: Orange juice carton by Gerald_G (CC0/public domain licence). Obtained via: http://openclipart.org/detail/9149/fast-food-drinks-juice-orange-by-gerald_g )