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Comment by bryans | Hacker News Reader

I'm rarely shocked by the ingredients of food anymore, but I was looking at a packet of "honey sauce" from KFC the other day, and couldn't help but laugh at the things we're doing to ourselves. There are 11 ingredients and 5 of them are added sugar. All to recreate something resembling honey, at approximately 2/3 the cost of real honey.

"High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Sugar, Honey (7%), Fructose, Contains 2% or Less of: Caramel Color, Molasses, Water, Citric Acid, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Malic Acid."

That is sugar, sugar, sugar, honey, sugar, color, sugar, water, acid, flavorant, acid. The lengths they've gone to save a literal penny are staggering.

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I’ve noticed that sometimes a snack food will have 3 different kinds of sugar as the 2-4th ingredients. I’ve wondered if they break it up like that so that the first ingredient isn’t sugar, even if there is more sugar-type-ingredients than there is of the first-listed ingredient.

It’s possible they use multiple types for flavor/texture reasons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some foods where it could be accomplished with sugar, but then everyone would know that the “snack” is mostly just sugar.

Yeah, I saw some soy milk at Whole Foods marked “no added sugar”. I was surprised that sugar might be added at all but I don’t drink the stuff. Anyway, I looked at the label and the #2 ingredient (after water) was “dehydrated cane juice” (i.e. sugar).

I bought a big jug of Starbucks coffee for a party, and they gave us a cup of soy milk for people to use as creamer. After the party, I tasted the leftover soy milk to see if I wanted to keep it for use with cereal or something. It was shockingly sweet — not like any other milk or milk substitute I've ever tasted.

Imagine the price of honey if all these faux sauces were made with more than a passing sniff of the stuff.

That's a good question. KFC gets 12 million customers per day. Let's generously assume an average of one 9g packet is included per customer. The packets already contain 7% honey, so to go full honey is an additional demand of 100 metric tons out of 4,850 produced daily, which represents ~2% of the total market. The average retail price of this grade of honey is $0.45/oz, so even presuming production continues to decline during this increased demand, we would see an increase of roughly $0.10 per 16oz bottle for store brand honeys. We would also be taking 5,475 metric tons of sugar out of global diets every year, or 22 billion calories.

OK, I imagine higher honey prices would bring more producers. Maybe some corn sugar producers would become honey producers. Then production would increase and price would decrease.

Similarly fake for mayonnaise both in restaurant packets and in most grocery stores.

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