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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

How does the FDA not have a standard that any oil with a plant in the name has to have the percentage of the oil that came from that plant?

"We can't regulate soybean oil labeled as avocado oil because we don't have a standard for avocado oil" is literally stupid. Hopefully it isn't quite the case.

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Careful of trivializing easy-sounding solutions. "Of course it's a good idea to monitor the quality of oil". Now it's regulated in the European Union, it's illegal to sell olive oil in an open container, such as in a restauraunt or refill shop.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/24/what-the...

I'd rather people took time and thought of the unintended consequences (or more likely, consequences intended by masquarading vested interests)

This article shows that a legislative body can regulate things for its citizens, and by retracting the law a week later, that a legislative body can learn about its mistakes.

Per my other comment, my fault for not double checking. But it's still illegal to sell refills.

Right, but instead of defining what can be called avocado oil, they could just require a list of ingredients, maybe even percentages.

> Right, but instead of defining what can be called avocado oil, they could just require a list of ingredients

FDA labeling requirements already do that.

The article you linked explains in the first paragraph that they withdrew that law immediately

My fault for posting in haste and not dobule checking. The bit about restauraunts was retracted. But not, as far as I know, the law against selling refills still stands.

My attention was drawn to this law by a refill shop which as far as I (and they!) know, are not still not allowed to refill a container. Here's a UK legal guidance page:

e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/olive-oil-regulations-and-inspec...

Why do we even need a standard? This is deceptive advertising. They said they were selling something but were caught selling something else. Must be some kind of fraud.

Because, unless there is a standard or they are explicitly claiming it is unmixed, being mixed with something else isn't legally deceptive. (Nor is it being rancid, though the defective product liability / warranty of merchantibility may come into play there.)

The 2 extra-virgin and one "pure" avocado oils here that are apparently just soybean oil probably at a minimum aren't listing soybean oil on their ingredients list.

Sure, and I am not saying that some of them aren't covered under current law, just that the set of them that are is narrower than the set that people seem to think (and I would agree) are problematic, and that even for the ones that are covered dealing with them is far less straightforward than with identity standards.

Perhaps they simply don't have the manpower to define standards for everything.

Yeah, that's why I pointed out there could be a broad labeling standard (if the name implies a plant oil, provide the percentage...).

Then they would at least be able to take action against violators.

EU food labeling regulation has following requirement (Article 22):

1. The indication of the quantity of an ingredient or category of ingredients used in the manufacture or preparation of a food shall be required where the ingredient or category of ingredients concerned:

(a) appears in the name of the food or is usually associated with that name by the consumer;

(b) is emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics; or

(c) is essential to characterise a food and to distinguish it from products with which it might be confused because of its name or appearance.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

There is also the general base requirement of not being misleading in Article 7:

1. Food information shall not be misleading, particularly:

(a) as to the characteristics of the food and, in particular, as to its nature, identity, properties, composition, quantity, durability, country of origin or place of provenance, method of manufacture or production;

(b) by attributing to the food effects or properties which it does not possess;

(c) by suggesting that the food possesses special characteristics when in fact all similar foods possess such characteristics, in particular by specifically emphasising the presence or absence of certain ingredients and/or nutrients;

(d) by suggesting, by means of the appearance, the description or pictorial representations, the presence of a particular food or an ingredient, while in reality a component naturally present or an ingredient normally used in that food has been substituted with a different component or a different ingredient.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Also presumably donations and counter lobbying by various “Oil Councils” and trade groups.

If this is indeed the case, wouldn't it make sense to force companies to indicate that that there is no quality standard on the label?

This is something that has standard in every developed country at least, not some niche weird product.

Defining a standard isn't that simple, you'd have to decide:

1) what all qualifies, every avocado type, are there variants that should be excluded, etc.

2) how pure is pure enough, when you're dumping truckloads of stuff into a hopper some other stuff is always along for the ride

3) what if pure xxx oil has some problems in processing or with shelf stability, etc. - what do you allow and what not

None of these questions are easy to answer so by default standards don't exist until there's a big push

None of these have a single right answer, but all of them have sensible ranges of answers. (And allowing soybean oil to be sold as pure avocado oil is not in that range. In case that was in doubt.)

“Allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good” is a recipe to not get anything done.

> (And allowing soybean oil to be sold as pure avocado oil is not in that range. In case that was in doubt.)

Yes, and for that reason what those oils are doing is already against the law.

Identifying a current practice that is currently illegal is a weird way to argue for making other practices illegal too. It suggests that (1) the first thing will keep happening; and (2) so will the other things. You didn't have a problem with the law to begin with; how is changing it supposed to help?

> But since avocado oil is relatively new on the scene, the Food and Drug Administration has not yet adopted “standards of identity,” which are basic food standards designed to protect consumers from being cheated by inferior products or confused by misleading labels. Over the last 80 years, the FDA has issued standards of identity for hundreds of products, like whiskey, chocolate, juices and mayonnaise.

...

> Avocado oil isn’t the only product without enforceable standards. Honey, spices and ground coffee are other common examples.

The FDA should wait until there's sufficient interest/demand for such a standard before implementing such a thing. We should not expect the FDA to be on the frontend of trends in food products. And clearly - if honey and coffee aren't standardized, not every food product needs to have such a standard.

What about some kind of fraud/false-advertising catch-all? Do we really need to wait for popularity in order to have a more generic regulation?

There are multiple ways to come at the problem, we could just say that the species origin of any oil included at greater than 1% concentration is required to be labeled in the ingredients and any oil not composed of greater than 95% concentration of single source must be labeled as "mixed"

I'm sure the legalease version of the above is a 100 page doc, but the FDA does provide similar generic rulings.

We're better off without any FDA standards of identity. Even maxerickson isn't asking for one; he's asking for a regulation that limits the use of ingredient names in general, not the names of individual products specifically. There is no public interest -- not in the sense of improving public welfare, and not in the sense of public demand -- in FDA standards of identity.

Standards of identity made the news recently, when the FDA granted an obvious petition after thinking for just 24 years: https://reason.com/2022/01/12/the-fda-finally-liberates-fren...

I think standards of identity (or other FDA action that isn't necessarily a standard of identity) for things like single-ingredient products like these oils is probably not really problematic... straightforward concrete rules about the point you can no longer call the product "avocado oil" because it's so much something else are to me a perfectly reasonable exercise of the government's power. To some degree this kind of thing is at least theoretically covered by existing general provisions, but enforcement is likely to be laxer than necessary where the "line" is fuzzy and there's a likelihood of litigation over it.

This is especially true for cooking oil, a major part of the differentiation between types and grades of oil is down to health benefits the consumer can't really detect on their own. Having solid rules that allow simple comparisons of the labeling that actually provide useful workable information is just providing the necessary framework for consumers to make informed choices.

This is different from, say, being able to tell whether or not you like your frozen cherry pie in the absence of the puzzlingly unique and specific frozen cherry pie food standard. We definitely have a variety of legacy standards that aren't productive.

> I think standards of identity (or other FDA action that isn't necessarily a standard of identity) for things like single-ingredient products like these oils is probably not really problematic... straightforward concrete rules about the point you can no longer call the product "avocado oil" because it's so much something else are to me a perfectly reasonable exercise of the government's power

So, the minor point is that this isn't a standard of identity. It'd be something different.

The more important point is that what you're talking about doesn't make sense. There is no particular reason to think that "avocado oil" is a single-ingredient product any more than you would think the same of "pomegranate juice". By volume, most juices are apple juice or grape juice, for the excellent reason that, in order to even be palatable to most consumers, pomegranate juice (for example) requires heavy dilution. Apple and grape juice are used because their flavors are so weak. But you're not getting ripped off when you buy pomegranate juice; you're getting exactly what you want.

The place to note that something is a single-ingredient product is in the ingredients list, like here: https://www.amazon.com/Kevala-Avocado-Oil-Fluid-Ounce/dp/B00... . And if the ingredients list is fraudulent, that isn't the same problem as the fact that some people are aesthetically opposed to the product's name.

I agree that the basic "authenticity" part of this situation (where the product in fact claims to be entirely avocado oil and isn't) is already covered by existing authorities, and is basically a different problem.

As for the rest of your post, well for one, "pomegranate juice," a product you buy that's 100% pomegranate juice and nothing else, isn't exactly uncommon: Pom Wonderful sells it all over the place. My grocery store store brand will also sell you something like "No Sugar Added 100% Juice Cranberry Pomegranate" followed by very small letters reading "flavored blend of 5 fruit juices with added ingredients"... Welch's settled a lawsuit several years for doing this very thing with a product that at least was being even a little more up-front about being primarily white grape juice.

As for there being no reason for people to think that something is what it claims to be, well I suppose that is a widely held belief that accounts for much of what we see in food labeling. I happen to think if you sell something that's 99% soybean oil and 1% avocado oil you shouldn't be able to call it "avocado oil" even if you are correctly listing the soybean oil first on the ingredients list. Or if it's 50/50 or 49/51 (and you can therefore list the avocado oil first) for that matter.

Ultimately names do matter. There's a reason the manufacturers care at all about what they're able to call their products, because it does actually affect how consumers act. Feel free to sell an otherwise accurately labeled 50/50 blend, just actually call it a blend. I really don't think it's unreasonable that if you give something an unqualified name of something that is a single ingredient that consumers should expect it to in fact be that thing.

> well for one, "pomegranate juice," a product you buy that's 100% pomegranate juice and nothing else, isn't exactly uncommon: Pom Wonderful sells it all over the place.

You're saying it's widely available. I'm saying it's not widely consumed.

And I stand by my opinion that naming a blended product after its most prominent flavor is both normal and desirable. But I see no issue with requiring blends to be labeled as blends. The regulation described sidethread here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30106290 ) seems pretty reasonable to me.

> 1. The indication of the quantity of an ingredient or category of ingredients used in the manufacture or preparation of a food shall be required where the ingredient or category of ingredients concerned:

> (a) appears in the name of the food or is usually associated with that name by the consumer;

> (b) is emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics; or [another clause]

But even in that case, you're free to sell something as "avocado oil" when it's 50% avocado-derived or even 20% avocado-derived [consider something like "garlic olive oil"]; you just need to disclose the amount.

I'd say "garlic olive oil" is a different category where its name already implies a mixture of these two things, and from that name you'd expect the resulting product to contain both garlic and olive oil, and be mostly olive oil (and would be mislabeled if it's actually artificial garlic flavor, or actually canola). It's the unqualified naming that I'm objecting to, in general.

Anyway, I think the EU regulation quoted sounds pretty reasonable also, assuming something about how reasonably prominent such information would need to be.

> I'd say "garlic olive oil" is a different category where its name already implies a mixture of these two things, and from that name you'd expect the resulting product to contain both garlic and olive oil

OK, granted, but that isn't true of "chili oil". It could refer to oil pressed from chili, but it doesn't.

I would imagine that a product labeled as avocado oil which contains no avocado oil at all is illegal already even without a standard of identity. The food safety laws have general provisions for adulteration and misbranding, and products doing this are probably lying on the label and ingredient list.

Ones where there's half some other oil or something along those lines, maybe less clear-cut. Depending on the labeling that might or might not be illegal. And whether the FDA feels confident or interested in going after any of this is a whole other story.

Right, "hopefully it isn't quite the case", but the article states that the FDA can't regulate the authenticity of the oil.

Like I'd be on board with banning the import of goods from companies that employ people that were principles at a business found to be adulterating food. Throw them out of the industry entirely the first time they get caught. Probably hard to enforce, but I'd be fine with that being the law.

What the article states is not necessarily true though. They definitely do have existing authorities on misbranding and adulteration that work for nonstandardized foods.

The quote from the researcher is that "But because there are no standards to determine if an avocado oil is of the quality and purity advertised, no one is regulating false or misleading labels." I'm sure there's truth here when it comes to oxidation and rancidity, more detailed characteristics like that, or claims of "extra virgin" which I'm not sure are defined to mean anything at all for avocado oil.

But the article's un-cited statement "Without standards, the FDA has no means to regulate avocado oil quality and authenticity," I'd want something more backing that up, particularly as to authenticity. I'm not convinced at all that the FDA really lacks the tools to police that what claims to be avocado oil merely is (or at least contains) avocado oil, if they wanted to. The statues and regulations on the names of foods and the accuracy of the ingredient list, they have those tools already.

It's possible a standard or something similar might be needed for some other quality issues, or to enforce some meaning behind common marketing terms like "extra virgin," though.

False advertising might fall more in the FTC's wheelhouse, or the FBI's for fraud.

Can't they be sued due to truth in advertising laws?

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