Sunday, September 2, 2012

Problems With Product Labels


Today, I stray away from my theme of wine to return to something that is closer to the mediocrity of our society.

One of my favorite snacks is Triscuits. They're crunchy, taste real and go great with cheese. My favorite variety is "fire-roasted tomato and olive oil." My weekly (or so) trip to the supermarket usually involves the purchase of a box, so naturally I felt my routine violated when Hannoford was out of my fire-roasted tomato the other week. I begrudgingly settled for a box of "roasted garlic."

Kraft gives an unhelpful description of ingredients.
These tasted pretty good, admittedly, but my true disappointment is with the product labeling. The eyes are first drawn to the brand name, "Triscuit," and then the variety "Roasted Garlic," but then below that, where we might expect to see some details about the roasted garlic, we instead see the rather vague, "natural flavor with other natural flavor." To me this sounds like the stupidest, most lawyer-generated label I've ever encountered. Correct my semantics if I'm wrong, but "natural flavor with other natural flavor" means the same thing as "natural flavors." Is it vitally important that we specify that there are two distinct natural flavors here without actually specifying what they are? Literally any small change would have made this better; even: "natural flavor with other natural flavors" sounds better than [this flavor with this other flavor]. Kraft might as well have said "two natural flavors."

What's even more confusing about this are the flavors themselves. The official flavor is roasted garlic, which I thought was one flavor, so where are these two distinct natural flavors coming from!? Kraft lies! It's not roasted garlic, it's roasted garlic and something else! Wait, maybe roasted is the flavor. Is that even possible? Who knows, maybe in this day and age, word-engineering, food-engineering and legal-engineering have created "roasted," a distinct natural flavor of Triscuit.

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