Not What It Seems

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Not What It Seems was Originally Posted on February 9, 2010 by

Recently I have written about items not being as you think.

I told you that pet food companies tell you their product is made from real meat, that is until you read the label and find that the main item is corn or wheat. Their meat is dunked in water and then weighed and their weight of th meat is wet. When dried it is a small image of its normal self. They also count wheat flour, wheat and gluten as different items, so that other products raise to the surface. By the way, this also happens with human food.

Then there is the Kona Coffee blends. They contain 10% Kona and 90% often coming from overseas. Lion coffee is sold here (it’s one of the oldest coffees in the U.S. and what is mostly sold in stores here, contains no coffee from the state. In Target the other day I counted the rows of coffee entitled Royal Kona Coffee. because their trade name contains the word Kona, the state cannot do anything about that. However, they had 44 rows of Kona 10% Blend and only 4 rows of 100% Kona. The funny thing is, those 44 rows contain almost exactly the same amount of kona as the 4 rows do. However they charge 3 times what the 10% would cost, thus you pay 3 times the retail cost for what 100% Kona would cost you. What a waste of money!

So I go into COSTCO and feel like cranberry juice, a white juice that isn’t as acidic as the red might be. COSTCO’s version is called

WHITE CRANBERRY PEACH

(100% Juice Blend)

The text is in decreasing text size (as you would expect). Then it reads “White cranberry and peach flavored blend of 4 fruit juices from concentrate with added ingredients”.

So when you finally get to read the back label, SURPRISE!

INGREDIENTS: Water, White Grape Juice Conecntrate…

HUH?

So the largest non-water ingredient is grape juice?

So, shouldn’t this be called Grape Juice with a hint of peach and cranberry? Think about it, the most common ingredient is not listed on the front label at all. That is like buying something like 80/20 hamburger, contains 80% sawdust. I can understand fillers, but when fillers are the majority of the product, then it becomes false advertising and/or fraud.

I believe a letter to COSTCO magazine may be in order. I hate to feel taken.