Et tu, Byerly's?

[mrissa]

Byerly's has started to have store brand candy bars at the checkstands, and I looked, and one of them was "dark chocolate with berries." Hurrah! I said on impulse, and I threw one into my cart and home it came.

I decided just at random, before opening the thing, to check what berries were in it.

Friends, there are no berries in it. There are beet flakes dyed with natural raspberry flavoring. There is natural blueberry flavoring. There is natural blackberry flavoring. And do you know what the FDA requires of "natural [fruit] flavoring"? Absolutely nothing. No berries were harmed in the making of this candy bar. It is perfectly legal to write, "dark chocolate with berries," as the label on something that is only mildly dark chocolate with no berries whatsoever.

This came up before when markgritter and I went to Vancouver, and I got granola bars for travel breakfasts, and I found out that "blueberry almond flax seed granola bars" contained no blueberries whatsoever. They had put in dried cranberries that had been dyed and flavored with blueberry juice. Guess how much that tastes like a blueberry? Hint: not very. (It may taste enough like a dried blueberry that people who don't eat many dried blueberries could mistake them, in the way that someone who has been a vegan for four years will tell you that that cut of seitan totally tastes like beef, while someone who had a steak for dinner last night will say, really, not so much. I, however, have a bowl of barley porridge with dried blueberries, dried apricots, and pecans for my breakfast the vast majority of mornings. I am significantly composed of recycled dried blueberry parts at this point.)

I'm just not okay with this. I'm really not. I feel like if it says "berry-flavored chocolate," you cannot expect there to be berries, because "flavored" is a weasel word. But when it says, "WITH BERRIES," really, the expectation of berries has been produced. If you came to dinner and I said, "I have made chicken with dill and almonds," and then I produced chicken with oregano and tomatoes, I think you could justly claim that I had not only misled you but flat-out lied. I bought this chocolate bar on the understanding that while I might prefer that it was filled with the pick of the Oregon marionberry crop, or tiny little dried cloudberries--ooh, now I want that--or something of the sort, I would be willing to take really whatever cut-rate berries they were willing to shove in the thing. But actual berries. That part is key. Shavings of third-best cranberries: fine. Beet flakes--beet flakes! Why do I even need to say that this is not fine?

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately this sort of thing is only the tip of the labeling iceberg, and there are plenty of companies out there who are trying to have other definitions "broadened" like this one.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

I so agree with you on this! And I find it highly annoying. Not that I agree with you, but the subject under agreement.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I am ever so slightly shocked. Only slightly because I am starting to get used to stuff like this, but - well, our laws are different from your laws. If it says "with blueberries" in the UK., it had bloody well better have blueberries in it. Beet flakes? ... No, I am. I'm shocked. And not at all okay with this, even at one remove. I'd start a campaign, except that they'd probably throw me out of the country and not let me back in after.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

While I am extremely sorry that this is the case, I'm glad to have brought it to your attention before the majority of your food shopping was taking place in US stores.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yuss. I shall take greater care with lists of ingredients and so forth. (Most of my cooking starts with base ingredients, but one ought to be able to trust chocolate bars to contain what the name suggests. Elsewise lies anarchy, say I...)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Last year I was shocked and migrained to discover that a "natural lemon beverage with other natural flavors" was flavored mainly with aspartame, and it was perfectly legal to do so. (Dasani Lemon, which in addition to giving me a howling headache has that lemon-soap flavor of other diet lemonades. I did not realize I was buying diet lemonade.)

Chagrin. Anger. A very unproductive series of emails with the Coca-Cola corporation.

[readingthedark.livejournal.com]

Yep. Unfine. (Though now I want some beets.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Tim and I also had this discussion, luckily before he went to the grocery store late last night.

[moiread]

I expected better of Byerly's. :(

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Minnesota: very nice, but still in the US.

Write to your elected representatives.

Not to suggest that they join Canada, though that's definitely an idea, but to suggest that labelling laws are something you care about and maybe they should too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's worth a try; Al Franken has unexpectedly cared about sensible, important things like the internet and whether people are allowed to get away with rape if they're contractors for various US government contracts, so maybe he cares about this also.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

He won't know it matters if nothing is said to him. As my mother is wont to say, "Make him go to the effort of actually disappointing you."

Because beet flakes, bits, slices, cube and so forth masquerading as berries (or is that "berries"?) is both an abuse of the intent of the law, the berry-loving consumer, and the beets. I'm not saying I would rush to buy a candy that advertised having beet chips in it, but I certainly feel we all deserve the right to not buy it in ignorance.

[redbird]

I wouldn't deliberately buy a chocolate candy with beet chips, but I would and do buy just plain beet chips (okay, a mix of beet, sweet potato, and I think taro chips), and I buy beets to roast them, and I want my beets to be beets and not imitation berries.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Beets have a valuable role to play in our lives. Playing dress-up and pretending to be berries is not that role.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

Surely the Berry Industry has a few lobbyists who would love to support your campaign.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Oh, do write to someone about this, because I'm genuinely shocked that a candy bar can say "with berries" and contain no berries at all. Next they'll be saying, "with chocolate" and it'll be a candy bar made entirely of differently flavored beet parts. I'm already cranky about what juice I buy since half the time it doesn't contain actual juice.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

K told me this (about the juice that isn't) last night, when I was ranting conveying to her my shock and displeasure about beet flakes masquerading as berries. I ranted was shocked and displeased all over again. I may have said that we order these things better in the UK. I hate to sound like a tedious patriot, but honestly...

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Always read the contents part of the labels. Always.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, markgritter and I had to have a conversation about how if it doesn't say "100% juice" on it, it is not, in fact, 100% juice, or a substance we would want to buy for juice purposes. It had been awhile since he'd done the shopping, and he had not noticed how completely horrible things had gotten in that regard.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

PS - what are marionberries?

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

A blackberry cultivar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marionberry).

[athenais.livejournal.com]

And totally delicious. I love marionberry pie.

[coho29.livejournal.com]

Yikes. My wife says that [scarequote]natural flavoring[/scarequote] sometimes also includes high-fructose corn syrup.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Regularly, in fact. All "natural flavoring" means is that the flavoring at some point involved an animal, vegetable, or fungus. When you're into petroleum products and chemicals that were never organic in origin, that's "artificial flavoring"

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

That's horrible! I had thought one could expect better of Byerly's. I write to explain to store headquarters and/or production companies how such things shake my confidence in them and cause me to contemplate shopping elsewhere to purchase more-honestly-labeled products from companies with a better grasp of quality. When a can is labeled "chunk white tuna," for example, it implies that one will find the tuna in actual chunks instead of looking like gloppy paper pulp, and secondly that said tuna will be white instead of a burgundy-peppered-with-blood-vessels color. I frequently get a good response from writing: Sometimes an assortment of free products of better quality are sent to me, and/or coupons for free top-of-the-line items from that company, along with groveling letters from their customer satisfaction department that make me feel like my opinion mattered and they were at least briefly ashamed and regretful of their lapse in judgment. If they get enough complaints, who knows? They may actually think of changing something.

I really do hope you'll tell Byerly's of the outrage this ridiculous and somewhat icky deception has caused you to feel, as well as the anger and ill will it has generated among a great deal of your friends who happen to be in the position of regularly deciding whether to spend money at Byerly's or to go to a competitor instead.

[jry.livejournal.com]

How'd it taste?