After posting about few labelling a few weeks ago I was surprised to turn on the radio just now to hear an item about supermarkets being misleading and unhelpful about healthy foods. I am not surprised because it should be obvious to everyone that the bottom line for supermarkets and fast food outlets is profit - nothing more, nothing less. The link is here:- bbc.com/news/health-47311097
Within a five mile radius there were two cafes promoting healthier food. One that suggests that gluten free, dairy free, egg free, etc. is a healthy choice does OK as it had attracted a core clientele. Please for those with allergies do not take this the wrong way - I respect choice being available not promoting it as a healthy lifestyle. The other opened last year and has already gone under although I think mismanagement and pricing were additional factors.
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MichaelJH
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Supermarkets tend to have free-from aisles nowadays. I think this is just a jump onto the, largely discredited, gluten-free bandwagon to enable them to charge higher prices. My wife is allergic to diary products but there are very few dairy-free products in these aisles.
My niece is also allergic to dairy. It appears A2 milk may be suitable for people allergic/intolerant to dairy. Problem is whilst it has featured in the media you cannot source it locally.
Over the past year the share price of Heinz has fallen nearly 30%. There are lots of reasons but a key one could be that people are, at long last, finally turning away from processed foods. A 30ml portion of Heinz Tomato Ketchup contains the equivalent of two sugar cubes. Once you know facts like that that it becomes a lot less likely that you'll let your kids splurge it all over their food!
I used to work in a dispensary for a food manufacturer, dispensing minor ingredients for processing. Tomato ketchup was one of the products I was involved in. Not the well known brand, but used in sachets for fast food outlets.
The ingredients were horrendous!
I only issued 3, ketchup spice, acetic acid and salt.
The finished batch was one tonne and included 600 grams of spice, 10.2 kg of acetic acid at 80% concentration, and 18.5 kg of salt. The major ingredients made up the bulk.
I only issued the acetic acid once myself and refused to go anywhere near it after that. At 100% concentration, breathing it in could at best, cause health problems, at worst, it would kill.
Some years ago I stayed in a hotel that had gourmet restaurant. At breakfast I saw the tomato sauce was an Italian organic variety so decided on a taster. Very, very different to Heinz and supermarket variants. It was far less sweet with a tangy quite refreshing flavour. You could by bottles for £4.50 so definitely an upmarket product.
I worked in the food industry for a number of years,
One of the companies being H.... Who made desserts for most of the supermarket chains.
It was a real eye opener tbh. But in an informative way.
You get what you pay for, the cheaper brands were made with cheaper ingredients, and perhaps not natural products, like flavour enhancers when only a very small amount of the main ingredient was used (eg apple or a butter flavour.)
The top end of the price range was real ingredients, good quality and no chemicals.
The second company I worked for, I was issuing minor ingredients for processing. They didn't even keep allergens separate from other products when I started.
Anyone could go help themselves to anything when I wasn't there.
A lot of food manufacturers have a metal detector on the end of the production line but not everything is picked up, depends on the size.
One place I worked had a chart on the wall for employees to check and see how many foreign object complaints they'd had each month.
Hair was the biggest culprit, followed by plastic and stones. All plastic hand tools used in production were stainless steel and/or blue plastic, blue shows up better apparently. If we had any other colour plastic complaint, it usually got blamed on the supplier of fruit or one of the other ingredients, that kept our complaints list lower. All the complaints were taken very seriously and fully investigated, but humans were involved in the processing, so it will never be eliminated ☺
I guess that's why the catering industry has blue plasters. Just waiting for the day we have bright blue foodstuff - can't be too long before that happens!!!
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- now completed. 
Blood pressure medication and certain foods
Govt food boxes
Is what food you eat really that important?
