Spot the two main ingredients in these fruit drinks
I don’t often have the time to prepare breakfast, so I tend to end up taking a bottle of Fruit2day to the workplace. The manufacturer, Swiss company Hero, promises that these drinks contain all the fruit you need in a day. (The drinks also contain a quarter of all the sugar you need in a day, but the producer doesn’t give that factoid as much prominence.)
Can you guess what the two main (fruit) ingredients of each drink are? Answers after the break. To get you started, the names of the drinks from left to right, when translated to English, are: “Strawberry Orange”, “Raspberry Grape”, and “Mango Peach”.
- The two main ingredients of the “Strawberry Orange” drink are: grape, strawberry (banana)
- The two main ingredients of the “Raspberry Grape” drink are: apple, mango (peach)
- The two main ingredients of the “Mango Peach” drink are: apple, banana (pear)
The bottle divides the ingredients into juices, purées and parts. I’ve mentioned the leaders of each category, and the parenthesized fruit is the leader that made up the smallest percentage (among the leaders) of the drink.
When Hero wanted to export Fruit2day to the USA in 2009, Jan van Iperen at The Juice Herald wrote:
Personally, I find this kind of packaging misleading as there is too much focus on just 2 fruit ingredients, while these (in some cases, just follow the order in which they appear on the label) are not even the MAIN ingredients.
From the website of the Food & Drug Administration (USA):
Q How are ingredients listed on a product label?
A Food manufacturers are required to list all ingredients in the food on the label. On a product label, the ingredients are listed in order of predominance, with the ingredients used in the greatest amount first, followed in descending order by those in smaller amounts. The label must list the names of any FDA-certified color additives (e.g., FD&C Blue No. 1 or the abbreviated name, Blue 1). But some ingredients can be listed collectively as “flavors,” “spices,” “artificial flavoring,” or in the case of color additives exempt from certification, “artificial colors”, without naming each one. Declaration of an allergenic ingredient in a collective or single color, flavor, or spice could be accomplished by simply naming the allergenic ingredient in the ingredient list.
http://www.fda.gov/food/foodingredientspackaging/ucm094211.htm#qalabel
Do the Dutch regs require a such a list on the labels? (Is that how you found your information?)
Good post! BTW, don’t you just love how manufacturers stress healthy living but add so much sugar! We’re bombarded with sugar, even in “water” drinks. My local co-op sells a drink with aloe vera (in a green bottle) but it is full of sugar! (I’d rather just drink aloe vera juice.)
I found my information on the manufacturer’s website. The old bottles also had the information, but the new bottles say things like: “Juice (apple, grape (18%)”.
I hear they had to admit a Lisp programmer to the mental ward of a local hospital after he’d try to read the new bottle. (Nerd joke. Knock wood.))
Branko, that joke was very very nerdy, but I am glad that years of CS taught me to appreciate it. About the apple thing, it is very frequent. These mixed juice bottles frequently are based on a generic apple-driven “fruitiness”, and then bum up the taste with flavors. The funny bit is that it would probably taste the same even if you removed the “real” mango in it.
A joke deserves another joke in response: do you know what is the recipe for the Horse and Skylark Patè? It starts like this: take one horse and one skylark.
Just the one skylark?