Bad Taste Food Awards 2019
Our annual Bad Taste Food Awards call out manufacturers on the claims they use to make their products seem like better choices.
Our annual Bad Taste Food Awards call out manufacturers on the claims they use to make their products seem like better choices.
Clever marketing by alternative 'healthy' food suppliers has convinced the uninitiated that, for example, coconut sugar and syrup, agave syrup, date puree (or any other fruit puree), are healthier than refined sugar, HA! sugar is sugar, whether sucrose, lactose, fructose, maltose etc and no matter its source. (Similarly with Pink Himalayan salt and all those other, very expensive, variants.) Large manufacturers pick up on this misinformation and use it in large volume products - it's good marketing, and I use that term in its considered, scientific form. Marketing is all about finding what consumers want and feeding (pun intended) that demand.
In order to counter this business process, we need to counter the misinformation and convince the 'worried well', who implicitly believe the healthy food purveyors, that salt is sodium chloride, and any 'healthier' alternative doesn't exist. That sugar is sugar - a carbohydrate.
NZ Food Safety and Food Safety Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) have projects underway to adjust food labelling to reflect these things. Sadly, only a small proportion of the population have sufficient knowledge to interpret the data, and quite a lot simply don't care.
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