 |
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
| About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: Textual annoyances | Main | Next: Car coffee cup
February 1, 2006 12:03 AM
Broken: Apple and Eve juice label
Greg O'Neill points out:
On the Apple and Eve Tropical Mango Passion juice label it says "100% juice," in big, bold letters.
However, if you look on the upper right corner of the label in really small skinny letters it says "Flavored blend of 4 juices from concentrate and other added ingredients."
This label is broken!
I don't think this is really that broken. Juice from concentrate counts as real juice according to the FDA. 100% juice lables basically mean that you're getting all juice instead of juice mixed with water and corn syrup.
The label isn't wrong, your beef is really with the regulations set out by the FDA about what 100% juice really means.
Tkerwin, the problem isn't the concentrate. It's the "other added ingredients." If there's other added ingredients, than it's not 100 percent juice.
And 100 percent is the one percentage you cannot round. It has one value, because it means in most contexts totality or completeness, and so if something is 99.9 percent whatever, you can't just round to 100 percent. Not logicially, anyway. Legally, who knows.
I'm pretty sure "100% Juice" most likely means 100% of your daily recommended value of Juice...secondly, they didn't say Fruit Juice, so as long all of the ingredients can be classified as a "Juice" then they didn't lie at all
"..."100% Juice" most likely means 100% of your daily recommended value of Juice..."
There is no such thing as %DV of juice. There is a %DV of vitamins, minerals and other stuff for the body, but no %DV of actual foods.
As for the added ingredients, well, if they are preservatives and other traces, that doesn't violate the 100% juice label at all. "100% juice" doesn't mean there's nothing else in it (counter-intuitive as that may seem). You don't expect them to say" "98% juice, 2% dissolved N2,O2,CO2,Ar" do you?
Contains 100% juice simply means that the juice that is one of the ingredients is 100% pure juice.
I have seen a label for "(large font)APPLE (small font)drink" which had this on it (don't remember the product):
"(large font) Contains Guaranteed 100% pure juice (small font) juice constitutes at least 25% of total volume" the other ingredients were sugar, water and artificial flavouring.
I agree with the bottom half of Phillip's statement. If they add the ingredients then they become part of the "not fruit juice."
I agree with the bottom half of Phillip's statement. If they add the ingredients then they become part of the "not fruit juice."
The way food stuffs can be labeled is broken. Juices arent the only guilty culprit in this mis-information advertising sceme- Just check out any dog or cat food bags, fruit snack products, etc. In this case what is especially broken is the definition of 100%-
shouldnt they have to not round it to 100%
sort of in the same way the antibacterial soaps and stuff work by killing 99.999999% of all germs, etc?
i mean 99.9999% is pretty close to 100% but they dont round to 100%.
I can't agree with those who say that they think that 100% is somehow a 'special' percentage that can't be round up to. Mathematically, 100% to to the nearest percentage means
99.5% == 99.5%
If this is true, they have every right to label it 100%, under the assumption that a figure given so is to the nearest percentage point. They would not, however, have the right to label it 100.0%
With john matrix's example, they don't round 99.9999% to 100% because they want people to know that their product only leaves 0.00001% of germs. Writing 100% would mean that their product could leave up to 0.5%.
From the FDA food labelling regulations:
"If the beverage contains 100 percent juice and also contains non-juice ingredients that do not result in a diminution of the juice soluble solids or, in the case of expressed juice, in a change in the volume, when the 100 percent juice declaration appears on a panel of the label that does not also bear the ingredient statement, it must be accompanied by the phrase "with added ___," the blank filled in with a term such as "ingredient(s)," "preservative," or "sweetener," as appropriate (e.g., "100% juice with added sweetener"), except that when the presence of the non-juice ingredient(s) is declared as a part of the statement of identity of the product, this phrase need not accompany the 100 percent juice declaration."
In other words, there isn't anything really broken. You are getting 100% juice with some negligible amount of additives.
You take pure juice, you evaporate 0.5% of water, and 0.5% of other stuff. In that case, your fruit content corresponds to the original 100% juice (this is how the percentage is measured, the fruit content is decisive). I know that this is not what you want to hear (I also prefer pure juice), but this is how it is done when prepared from concentrate (although you of course evaporate much more, and, as others have already noted, it is in line with the food market regulations.
I think the other ingredients are made from juice. The company can then claim it's 100% juice, while it's not all REALLY juice.
They could have pulled the trick where the 50% is 200% concentrate and the rest is water and other ingredients. Since you're diluting the conentrate down to 100%, it counts as 100% juice.
Here are the ingredients, directly from the Apple & Eve website:
http://www.appleandeve.com/Pages/TropicalsB.html#Anchor-43266
It's a bit like Suddy-D or whatever. 5% of the actual product is juice, but that 5% is 100% juice...
Who cares how much juice is in it. It is the "other" ingredients/toxic waste that mixes good with vodka. Vodka purifies it back to 100% juice. umm umm good!
I'll tell you this: at the vending machines at my middle school, the machines themselves advertise "100% Apple/Orange Juice," but usually, all they have is "juice drinks" with only 5% juice. The whole concept of adding stuff to perfectly good juice is broken!
Perhaps they inject the extra ingredients into fruit before getting the juice out. That way they can say that all they use is fruit, though there is stuff within the fruit. OR: they've found a way to make sugar juice, vitamin C juice, water juice, etc... That way the drink is composed of 100% juice(s).
Greg O'Neill is broken for not taking a picture of the back side of the label. The front side is not enough info to decide if the 100% juice label is broken or not.
That said, Mango & Passion Fruit are probably all you can taste in this drink. The fact that this contains "100% juice" means it has 100% of juice from any fruits. If it has two other fruit juices in it means nothing to my taste buds. I have seen labels that say 27% and 47% juice on them, so this brand is probably one of the few that actually care about the health of the customer.
Jonathan
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Textual annoyances | Main | Next: Car coffee cup
The other added ingredients are so small that they probably don't even make up the .5% necessary to round down to 99%. It's marketing, and all marketing is some form or another of a lie. (Yay first) I do see your point though
Posted by: James at February 1, 2006 12:20 AM