I went shopping in a new store today. At first I was excited to find something with 100% juice that wasn’t absurdly expensive. But then I looked at the ingredients and saw cochineal extract, AKA carmine, AKA crushes beetles used to make things red.
I just don’t understand. You’ve got this juice, you could totally add beet juice for coloring and achieve a beautiful color. But no, gotta throw insects into it instead. As far as hidden non-vegan ingredients go, stuff from insects tends to fly under the radar. Yet I bet if more people were aware of what they were buying, even non-vegans would take issue with it.
Legally how can you state it is 100% juice when the first ingredient is filtered water, then you add the cochineal extract, and the acorbic acid. I mean it’s mostly juice but it’s clearly not 100% juice. I feel like this is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Some additives are allowed in small amounts, and the water is allowed because it’s juice from concentrate where you can add exactly the amount of filtered water that was previously removed to make the concentrate.
Ah that makes so much sense, thanks for clarifying! Manufacturers are legally allowed to lie to consumers, that’s much better!
Like how tic tacs are “sugar free” at “0 gm” per serving yet they are 94% sugar. At 0.49 gm per tic tac any amount of sugar is rounded down. Thanks FDA!
I think it’s actually “less than one is zero”. So 0.94g is no sugar in a 1g tic-tac.
A tic tac is purposefully 0.49 grams in total weight. At 94% sugar that is about 0.46 grams of sugar.
From the company’s point of view, this is not a lie. They’re following a legal definition that tells them what they can call their product. The law defines what 100% means, and a product falling under this definition can’t legally use e.g. names for diluted juice products, in the same way that it couldn’t be sold as milk.
You aren’t going to like the “supplements” isle, then.
It’s not necessarily the same amount of water that was previously removed, it’s based on the sugar content in the resulting mix from the concentrate. So if you had super sugary apples, you may be able to make more “100% juice” than you started with by concentrating and re-diluting it.
Concentrate is very bitter. The banana pulp and “natural flavours” (stuff like apple and pumpkin) is added to sweeten the drink.
They cannot add sugar and call it “juice”.
Sorry, I blocked my sentence weird… it’s based on (suger from juice concentrate) in the final mix.
For example, 100% apple juice is apple juice concentrate diluted to at least 11.5% (sugar from concentrate).
Hypothetically, if I could breed super apples that made 23% sugar juice, I could concentrate and redilute 1L of juice to make 2L of 100% juice.