Re: Food labelling law


jack wrote:

Pete C. wrote:
jack wrote:
Pete C. wrote:
Laser etching of text uses no consumables beyond power (and eventual
laser replacement). A large percentage of the expiration dates are
already printed that way. As to the cost of the scanners, they are
already in place for the most part, they just need to be used more
effectively.

Printing/etching a sell-by date at high-speed is one thing, etching a
block of text in small font is a little bit more work. Think 4 lasers
instead of one, at 1/2 the throughput per line, with additional work to
stabilize the product on the belt to keep things legible.

Considering that that they're already testing laser marking of the
entire label on produce like apples, it seems this is not a significant
issue.

Barcode
scanners are common *after* the packaging process for warehouse
management and routing, much less common *before* the packaging process.

Something that is not very expensive to change, especially given the
increased shipment acceptance testing of raw ingredients that is
becoming more common given the liability issues of poisoning people from
negligence in testing those raw ingredients.



And even if a company spends the money to implement that sort of thing,
management has a hard time keeping the staff from taking shortcuts and
bypassing the process. That can be fixed again by appointing more
supervisors at great cost, or by installing CCTV systems in the plant at
a somewhat smaller monetary cost, but at a much greater 'hassle' cost
with the *&(#*@ unions about worker privacy. And so we can go on.

You can go on, but it won't validate your flimsy argument. We're talking
about large scale industrial processed food producers, not mom and pop
operations. These producers already have production controls more than
tight enough to be able to implement this type of change with minimal
expense and effort.

Probably the small mom-and-pop operations won't have a big problem with
it, I don't think they change suppliers that often (no experience with
that though, so I might be wrong).

The true mom and pop producers should have no problem since most of
their ingredients are locally sourced if not self produced and don't
change often.

The large-scale producers have a much
bigger problem, they ship partially-produced stuff between plants in
bulk, generally have multiple suppliers for each ingredient so that if
one supplier has a problem they can fall back to another one, etc.
And tight controls or not, for example 'oil' is not kept separated in
tanks 'oil from supplier A' and 'oil from supplier B', there is one huge
tank labeled 'oil'. So if supplier A's oil comes from China, and
supplier B's oil from Brazil, no one can tell what percentage Chinese
oil ended up in a particular product.

They may not be able to easily keep stuff like the oil separate in
current production, but they certainly can easily list the oil as from
USA and/or China for example. As they change and upgrade production
lines as they always do, such separation is relatively easy to
incorporate. They are already having to expand acceptance testing for
each new shipment of an ingredient beyond the "it looks and feels like
vegetable oil" level of testing.



<snip>

Most certainly consumer pressures are demanding detailed origin
labeling, and the laws are starting to catch up. Those producers who
implement such detailed labeling before they're forced to can promote
that fact and more than recoup their extra expense in increased sales.

This consumer definitely isn't interested. If the packaging of some
product starts looking like there have been lawyers involved in the
design, I can imagine the effort that went into getting it that way, and
the manufacturer is not going to try to recoup that by increased sales
alone, the next price increase is going to be a few percent more. Time
to switch to another brand.

It's not a significant change, only the ingredients block which
represents a few percent of the package surface on most products. A
rapidly growing percentage of consumers are indeed looking for such
information, and that can only be expected to grow. We've already seen
increases in sales of kosher foods, not due to growing populations of
any religion, but due to that listing being perceived as an indication
of better quality control (correctly or incorrectly).



The kosher labeling is a good example of the value of the additional
effort, despite the rants of bigoted trailer trash, the small additional
cost to the manufacturer to add this certification increases their
market and resulting profits far in excess of the implementation cost.

Consumers will see a manufacturer voluntarily implementing detailed
country of origin labeling as more open and look at those who don't as
trying to hide something. As it is this type of labeling is already in
place on a lot of products, look to your orange juice for a "contains
concentrate from USA, Brazil..." type labeling.


No orange juice in stock here, except in raw form (i.e. fresh oranges of
unspecified origin), sorry.

The container of Tropicana Pure Premium (not from concentrate) I have
here indicates "Contains orange juice from the U.S. and Brazil" directly
under the nutrition information block.


j.

PS. What about the origins of the packaging? "Outer carton manufactured
in Korea, printed in China using Indonesian ink; Inner plastic bag made
in USA using plastic made from Texas oil"

Oddly enough much of that has been common for a long time.

Printed in China, yes. Each individual component, no.

In many cases, yes, it does. With the increased marking of packaging
components with recycling codes, the origin is often included in that
marking.
.

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