Of course companies would protest, claiming that their recipes are trade secrets, but we already require that products list their ingredients, and we protect trademarks for products, which seems unreasonable if companies can alter the contents of what is being protected, without telling customers.
To be clear, though, I'm not actually advocating that the labels report precise amounts of each ingredient, but they should be forced to say something like "40% more salt" or "70% more water", at least next to the ingredients, and "New recipe" on the front (as many products already do).
Cue worse-tasting chocolate bars showing up in the stores, proudly proclaiming on their wrappers: NOW WITH MORE HAZELNUTS.
Note that a lot can be told just looking at the label, but few people do it. For example quality meats tend to have more protein, quality diary products tend to to have more fat. High salt and sugar is usually a bad sign.
The order of ingredients is important too: greatest amount first. It means that if the thing they advertise in front of the package is way down the list, that's not good.
The front of the package prominently declared "Made With Real Cheese!".
When she read the ingredients list, not only was cheese way down on the list--it was on the bread ingredients list, not the "cheese" dip ingredients list.
Certain strong flavors, like mint, pepper, and lemon, usually appear pretty low in the ingredients list at the same time they're headlining the label.
I got in the habit trying to avoid palm oil, but there's all kinds of surprises in there.
Not in the "I'm shocked there are chemicals in my food" way. But just in the transparent differences in formulation by weight.
Check out marinades / BBQ sauces and baked beans.
Its terrible how disconnected we are from the things that sustain us. There are so many companies involved in producing something simple. We can gradually expose the consumers to all these business processes we've accumulated over many thousands of years. I think it could be mind blowing in many ways.
People aslo behave different if someone might be looking. Investors get a tour of the facility and everything seems designed for them rather than for the customer. I've seen places remove chairs and force everyone to stand all day simply because it looked good to investors. Open floor plans anyone? From an investor perspective the less room for livestock the better. Salaries cant possibly be low enough. etc
Have them make [say] a nice video showing the production process. Have some fancy committee sign of on it. Or if the product is to embarrassed to show how it's made have it pay the 1% extra taxes.
However the UK did not vote to join in a plebiscite. We joined in 73, and had a referendum on leaving in 75.
I'd suggest that the issue in the UK was in part that the changed nature of our constitution after joining was never explained in schools (no Civics classes). Plus almost all discussion of it domestically tended to use the phrase "Common Market".
So we ended up creating a generation who were naturally eurosceptic, and were quite surprised by the changes post '94 once the EU emerged, and the single market reforms came in to existence.
Basically a lot of the people in that generation were not aware that we had joined a political union, with a level of law and government above that of the nation state. The generation before (who voted in '75) should have known that. The various institutions of state (government, civil service, courts, judges, etc) knew.
However that general ignorance existed (and still exists), it being reflected in our MPs, where a lot of them still (after 3 years of confusion) still do not understand the nature of their (and our) relationship with the EU.
Some people claim it was sold as purely economic union, some claim it was well known goal back then.
But a lot of the rules that are supposedly so bad are rules that would be there in a purely economic union.
Ridiculous proposition.
Formulations change pretty much constantly for various reasons (ingredients become more expensive, or you change suppliers, or you decide to adjust something to make the product better or cheaper or both), and adding bureaucratic friction as well as packaging redesign is completely impractical. Packaging can take several weeks if not month to produce and you would have to constantly throw them away with this kind of rule. Wasteful.
1. I want to be able to compare w other brands 2. I don’t want any filler at all!
If chocolate goes up in price, I’ll pay more to get the real stuff, or buy less of it. I most certainly won’t buy a bar of food wax with chocolate solids, or whatever Hershey is
Depends where you live but many brands actually indicate their content of chocolate directly on the box (70%, 80% etc... unless you buy milk chocolate.
As for not wanting any filler at all: then buy pure cocoa beans! If you buy processed food you should always assume there is some kind of "filler". And not that "fillers" are also necessary sometimes to give a proper texture to what you eat and make sure the taste is consistent from one box to another.
All dane-pgp's proposed law would change is that when they change the labels to match the new formulation, which they must do, they would have to include a change date or a version number of something like that on the new label.
Now if we could only get a "roasted-on" date requirement for coffee ...
The proposal was a lot more aggressive than that -- dane-pgp specified that the packaging must mention if the ingredients stay the same but their relative proportions change. Under current law, there is no reason to alter the labeling for such a change[1], so you'd be seeing a huge requirement for new labels that weren't formerly required.
[1] Actually, there are two. First, you might switch up the relative proportions so much that the rank order of the absolute amounts changes, which would require reprinting the ingredients list. This is really unlikely.
Second, you might end up altering the Nutrition Facts information. That would also require relabeling. I don't know how likely that is; the Nutrition Facts panel is a pretty low-resolution instrument.
Large manufacturers will be fine, there's no particular reason for society to care about their wellbeing so much.
We need this law in the US. I’m not one to push for new regulations, but I have seen this happen time and again with big companies (Nabisco, General Mills) that shrink their boxes and count on the customer not to notice.
We'd end up in a miasma of litigation around whether one product is a reduced quantity of another, or if they're separate product lines.
Products already list quantities. That's enough for someone paying attention to value.
I’ll do the math. But I do want wt%
Do you have a source for the $/Oz being due to bad behavior? From what I’ve heard it was done purely to address consumer demand.
See the 'Background' section on page 11 of https://www.nist.gov/document/sp1181-unit-pricing-guidepdf and more generally https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/laws-and-regul.... So yes, it was done purely to address consumer demand... by way of laws and regulations with producers and retailers under threat of even more onerous laws and regulations.
A contemporary example to hopefully convey the situation back then: if 'right to repair' becomes law at some point, this would also be due to consumer demand. Notice the level of interest companies have in addressing this consumer demand prior to legislation being passed...
Price/oz
Price/lb
Price/bar
Price/unit (which might be bar or package of two bars)
So you get tk calculate the difference in your head.
Maybe this is "my fault", but I'd guess that most consumers don't pay that much attention to the exact number of ounces (which are sometimes fractional) in the box.
Even then, I’m aware that many items have differences in content which game the price/measurement like a lower ingredient content (less cocoa per measurement and more fillers or water content).
There is not really a great way to combat these practices if you are not some kind of professional buyer that only purchases at wholesale scales.
(1) Recently I wanted a bag of sugar. At my closest grocery store, the bag was 4 pounds instead of 5. No problem: At my next stop at Sam's Club, I got two bags, 15 pounds each.
(2) Sometimes dish soap comes in small bottles. Okay, at Sam's get a gallon jug of their generic dish soap and with a funnel refill the small bottles. Same for glass cleaner, etc.
(3) Pizza can be $7 to $20. Okay. (i) In a 5 quart bowl, add 750 ml water and 1 T dry yeast. Let the yeast soften. Measure 1 kg of flour. Add 1 T salt to the water, stir, add 2/3rds of the flour, stir, add the rest of the flour, mix some, and dump on a floured board. By hand mix and knead for 8 minutes. Return to the bowl, cover, and let rise to fill the bowl. Dump on the board, form in a long loaf, cut into 8 equal pieces, place each each in a covered plastic bowl, refrigerate. Starting the next day for two weeks or so, for a pizza, take one of the dough pieces, in a microwave proof plate form in a circle 7-9" in diameter, and warm in microwave for 3 minutes. Add 3 T sauce, 1/4 C shredded Mozzarella, and maybe some pepperoni, sausage, etc., place in a clean steel pan, over medium heat, covered, for 13 minutes, move to a cutting board, slice, slide to a dinner plate, add 1 T of grated hard cheese, and eat. Get the flour, 25 pounds, at Sam's, and then the flour for one pizza is about 9 cents. With good toppings, the total cost is still about $1. So, anytime, in 20 minutes, 7 of effort and 13 waiting, get a pizza faster, better, and cheaper than frozen, carryout, or delivery.
I don't know where you live, but in Manhattan your version will be cheaper, but it will definitely not be better and most likely will be no faster.
Neither your stove nor your oven can match a commercial pizza oven.
> match a commercial pizza oven.
"Match" in what sense? What I described is different but works great.
For the 20 minutes, even in Manhattan, tough to take the order, make and bake the pizza, slice it, box it, and deliver it, all in 20 minutes.
For the quality, that's a matter of taste, but frozen, carryout, and delivery don't use better ingredients.
Whatever strong opinions some people in Manhattan may have about pizza, for the world of pizza, Manhattan is a very tiny place. E.g., apparently all or nearly all Sam's Clubs scattered all across the US sell 5 pound bags of part skim, shredded, Mozzarella cheese, and no doubt nearly all of it goes for pizza: Pizza is all over the US and much of the rest of the world -- in comparison, Manhattan is a small thing!
By the way, for delivering a pizza quickly, there is a fundamental problem made fully clear in queuing theory: The orders have to arrive essentially as a Poisson process. But the pizza shop has only fixed capacity in pizzas made per minute. So, we have random demand fed to a fixed resource. Then the pizza shop has just two alternatives, (i) deliver quickly but have a lot of expensive time where the delivery people are doing nothing and (2) delivery slowly, from a queue, where the delivery people are busy but the customers have to wait.
I live a couple blocks from a pizza place. I order, wait 10 min, then turn on my oven, and then pick it up 10 min later.
For the actual, final baking, I'm not using an oven and am using just a common, restaurant style, all steel saute pan with a circular flat bottom about 8" in diameter. So, I get the bottom of the pizza crisp and as brown as I want. And I cover the pan to create an oven that does cook the dough some more and melt the cheese.
All of this is my response to the OP about shrinkflation. I've outlined a response -- 20 minutes, 9 cents of flour, crisp bottom, sauce, cheese, and sausage of your choice, etc. My post is just in response to the OP's shrinkflation and not throwing down a gauntlet as the world's greatest pizza, better than NYC, Chicago, Naples, etc. For one, do some arithmetic on the 1 kg of flour, split 8 ways, and the 7" diameter -- get a relatively thick pizza, and people who want pizza very thin might not be happy.
Except for fast-food companies, which we've been told have slyly been increasing their portion sizes and making us fat.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17585324
Or maybe we could just stop being victims of the evil corporations and we take responsibility for our lives.
I think it's a very good development.
Both width and thickness of the sheets can vary. For both, larger is better. All three measurements interact together when forming a wad of paper. All three contribute to the size of the wad.
Also, many people fold rather than wad.
This. Mass is just a nonsense unit for me as a folder. You might as well be advertising density or albedo. If anything, I'd want the base unit to be
number of sheets * number of layers per sheetThat said, the general point of your post still stands.
Chocolate bars used to have 200g. Some now have less than 100g. Toilet paper rolls used to have 50m; most now have 30m and some have only 10m.
This sort of thing started happening in the 1980s, because the government had frozen prices (that always works well). It became such a problem that now the law says that the packaging must clearly point out if the quantity inside has changed.