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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> I'd also like to see a law passed that requires each product to mention on its packaging if its ingredients (even just their relative proportions) have changed. This would apply to things like foods/drinks and also cleaning products.

Ridiculous proposition.

Formulations change pretty much constantly for various reasons (ingredients become more expensive, or you change suppliers, or you decide to adjust something to make the product better or cheaper or both), and adding bureaucratic friction as well as packaging redesign is completely impractical. Packaging can take several weeks if not month to produce and you would have to constantly throw them away with this kind of rule. Wasteful.

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As a consumer I rather like it when I know how much filler is added in my products

1. I want to be able to compare w other brands 2. I don’t want any filler at all!

If chocolate goes up in price, I’ll pay more to get the real stuff, or buy less of it. I most certainly won’t buy a bar of food wax with chocolate solids, or whatever Hershey is

> As a consumer I rather like it when I know how much filler is added in my products

Depends where you live but many brands actually indicate their content of chocolate directly on the box (70%, 80% etc... unless you buy milk chocolate.

As for not wanting any filler at all: then buy pure cocoa beans! If you buy processed food you should always assume there is some kind of "filler". And not that "fillers" are also necessary sometimes to give a proper texture to what you eat and make sure the taste is consistent from one box to another.

That's wrong in regard to food labels. If the formulation has changed in a way that makes those already printed labels inaccurate, they already have to throw them away to comply with Federal law and FDA rules.

All dane-pgp's proposed law would change is that when they change the labels to match the new formulation, which they must do, they would have to include a change date or a version number of something like that on the new label.

A "last-modified" date on the standard nutritional info would be great pro-consumer regulation.

Now if we could only get a "roasted-on" date requirement for coffee ...

> All dane-pgp's proposed law would change is that when they change the labels to match the new formulation, which they must do, they would have to include a change date or a version number of something like that on the new label.

The proposal was a lot more aggressive than that -- dane-pgp specified that the packaging must mention if the ingredients stay the same but their relative proportions change. Under current law, there is no reason to alter the labeling for such a change[1], so you'd be seeing a huge requirement for new labels that weren't formerly required.

[1] Actually, there are two. First, you might switch up the relative proportions so much that the rank order of the absolute amounts changes, which would require reprinting the ingredients list. This is really unlikely.

Second, you might end up altering the Nutrition Facts information. That would also require relabeling. I don't know how likely that is; the Nutrition Facts panel is a pretty low-resolution instrument.

Ok, but what is your better suggestion to solve the problem of quality or content creep that affects consumers and economic data? Perhaps there is a good way to have consumers be informed, or perhaps there isn’t. But at the very least, accurate data for economic statistics should be available since that same kind of data is available at batch levels for safety and compliance purposes.

You could solve the packaging issue by putting a sticker on the package.

Large manufacturers will be fine, there's no particular reason for society to care about their wellbeing so much.

"Now 20% less!”

"Now 20% lighter!"

"Now 20% less calories!" ??

Not a good news ?!!!

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