Friday, June 27, 2008

Consumer Products With Padding

Attention food manufacturers and supermarkets. Just so you know - I've noticed when you pad out your products with cheap ingredients. I know when I pick up a carton of pomegranate 100% juice drink and it turns out to be 50% grape juice that I'm being ripped off. I know grape juice is the cheapest juice on the market. If it wasn't why would there be a never-ending run of clearly press release-driven "news" stories about how good for you grape juice is (note however that that's all purple grape juice, while I'm pretty sure the pomegranate juice is cut with white grape juice)?

I know when I look at a supposedly chicken-based soup and it contains more carrots, potatoes, rice, onions and peas than it does chicken that somebody somewhere thinks I'm stupid enough to base my choice of food on the picture on the front of the tin, rather than the information on the back. And even those ingredients are second only to water. What is the point of selling uncondensed soup?

And on that subject there are adverts on TV at the moment for a fabric softener "now condensed". Surely what they mean is "by the way, that stuff we've been selling you for the last 50 years was mostly water!!".

Isn't it time companies realised that we're not fooled by this stuff any more. Isn't it time these guys cut their advertising budgets and instead spent the money on an internal CSR (corporate responsibility) audit to see how they could be better benefiting consumers, the environment, their employees and the communities they operate in. Then when you've started using better ingredients in a better way, send out a press release about that!

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