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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

I have thought about this hack before while looking at ingredient lists. I don't know what the best wording would be to establish the spirit of the law, but obviously this should be banned.

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Strawberries (11%) would be sufficient:

> You must mention the quantity (by percentage) of any ingredients that: appear in the name of the product (example: ‘apple pie') [; or] are emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics (example: ‘with walnuts')[; or] are essential to characterise the food and to distinguish it from other foods[.]

— EU food labeling rules, https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-rules-complian...

This would be rather interesting, I've noticed whenever a product is "with ___" [insert hot substance or ingredient], its almost always near the very end of the ingredients list, meaning its among the lowest in amounts of ingredients used in the product

Yes, it’s generally bad to have a high percentage of capsaicin, but it’s still a figure worth noting :) I would encourage in that scenario specifying the % and then also the estimated scovilles total.

Hot = popular or in vogue, like adding the prefix "super-" to any fruit or berry

How is this a 'hack'? It's listing ingredients in order of quantity. The nutrition facts already tell you total amount of sugar per serving separately, that's not what the ingredient list is for to begin with. Also, I don't have much sympathy for someone surprised that jelly contains a lot of sugar: A) Have you tasted it B) Do you have any idea what jelly is or why it exists C) Have you ever made it?

Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.

If it is done with intent to mislead consumers, then it is a hack.

> Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.

If a typical jelly recipe calls for pounds of fruit and a few cups of sugar wouldn't be normal to expect fruit to be the first ingredient? If a company is using more added sugars than fruit that should be obvious without having to look at the nutrition facts

For the product in question, they aren't using more added sugars than fruit.

As you can read on the label:

    Ingredients: Strawberries, High Fructose Corn syrup, Corn syrup, Sugar, Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid.

    Serving Size              20g

    Total Sugars              12g
       Total Added Sugars      9g

Each tablespoon of jam contains 10-11 grams of fruit and 9-10 grams of added sugar. The jam is 60% sugar overall because there is sugar in the fruit too.

And that's weighted by share of the output. If you're measuring the input, this recipe is going to take a lot more "fruit" than "sugar", because part of making jam is boiling away a bunch of the water that occurs in fruit, whereas all of the added sugar is retained. (Corn syrup, however, seems to be about 2/3 water, which will make that comparison look worse.)

Typical jelly & jamrecipes call for close to 1:1 fruit to sugar. E.g. ¹Ball mason jars strawberry jam recipe calls for 7 cups sugar to 5 cups strawberries. Martha Stewart calls for 3/4 cup sugar for every cup of juice² in making jelly. The Joy of Cooking (44th printing 1988)notes that "Store-bought jellies, according to law, must have at least 45% fruit and 55% sugar". Etc.

¹https://www.ballmasonjars.com/blog?cid=classic-strawberry-ja...

²https://www.marthastewart.com/1127955/basic-jelly-recipe

³ ISBN 0-02-604570-2, Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer & Becker, page 832

You can make jam with a lot less sugar. I make my own strawberry confiture at home and use about 5% sugar, plus pectine and sweet lemon juice.

And I can make a bowl of cereal with a teaspoon of milk.

Pity you think that.

I think my comment was a touch deeper than you caught. Jam doesn’t have a strictly required amount of sugar, it’s not defined as having X amount, so saying “you can make it with less” is two people talking about how much milk makes a bowl of cereal. Both are correct, it’s jam either way and it’s a bowl of cereal either way. Think about it.

You're right, good point.

It depends on the type of fruit though, since there are some fruits that won't set properly with the low-sugar pectin. (This only applies to home canning though, since the industrial manufacturers should have access to other thickeners.)

It does come out a bit less viscous than industrial jams, although enough that it can stay on top of a slice of bread, but it's much healthier and, more importantly, it tastes so much better. Works with berries pretty well.

> It does come out a bit less viscous than industrial jams, although enough that it can stay on top of a slice of bread

It really depends on the fruit though—most of the time it works great, but there have been a few fruits that wouldn't set at all (closer to a syrup than a jam) with a low-sugar recipe, but set perfectly when I added more sugar.

> and, more importantly, it tastes so much better.

Agreed 100%.

There's no way that would be legal to sell. The whole point of the sugar in jam is preservation - you may get away with it for a while in a home canning scenario, but really a jam with 5% sugar is not shelf stable, and needs to be stored under refrigeration (commercial low sugar jams have to add an additional preservative like potassium sorbate instead).

It doesn't matter it's not legal to sell. I keep it in my basement which is cold (around 15 C) all year round, without problems.

In some jurisdiction, you cannot call that a jam, because you added foreign pectin. A jam must only use the fruit's natural pectin, plus sugar to activate the pectin.

Irrelevant.

This was my impression. I also find most juices can be diluted at least 25 % and its still incredibly drinkable, you just get more bang for the buck

You can make quick mocktails with a fruit juice as base (or a mini can of Coke, 200ml): 1 part fruit juice, 1 part fizzy water, a little tonic water, a few dashes of your favorite bitter (Angostura, orange, cardamon, etc...) and a slice of lemon or lime.

The Joy of Cooking's recipes do this, but the total sugar content ends up the same because they boil down the juice into a thick syrup first. The sugar just comes from the same fruit as what's being preserved, instead of cane or beets.

The hack is to use several different ingredients of the same type where they would have used just one, and doing it just so they can have the ingredient they want listed first as first.

Because the intent is to mislead while staying within the letter of the rules. I don't think it's complicated.

The solution is to require % by mass number next to each ingredient. This way even if strawberry is first ingredient, the low percentage will make the scam obvious.

That's likely untenable for food companies because it means disclosing their recipe.

Well if becomes law, not doing it is even more untenable

A company's desire to hide their recipe shouldn't matter over the consumer's desire to know what's in the food they buy and eat.

> it means disclosing their recipe

“Natural flavors.”

I doubt you can’t reverse engineer those fractions from a product and ingredient list anyway.

The same argument could be used against disclosing ingredients altogether.

I'd rather know what I'm eating and not have greedy CEOs pinching their pennies of profit like they're guarding the Krabby Patty formula, because they're scared someone else will learn the generational secret of how to make (checks notes) strawberry jelly. Trust me, the economy will survive if Smuckers tells you how much sugar you're eating.

As another commenter mentioned, EU rules already require this for "prominent" ingredients (e.g. ingredients that appear in the name of the product, like "Strawberry" jam), but not all ingredients in the list, which seems like the appropriate compromise.

It works in the EU.

Sorry if it sucks for their competitive advantage or profit margin or whatever but people are literally going to put this stuff in their bodies to sustain their existence so you have to say what’s in it. If you want to keep your product composition a mystery go make SaaS and put it behind an API.

You can be sure the competitors are putting their product on the mass spec already

That solution is already in place for sugar. The jam that is the focus of the tweet is 60% sugar, and this is prominently printed on the label. What problem do you think you're trying to solve?

The product could still be 60% sugar and contain 0% strawberries. It could be still be 60% sugar and contain 1% strawberries.

Sugar content doesn't tell you anything about berry content. It's not unreasonable for someone to want look at the list of ingredients and know if what they are buying is mostly fruit or mostly HFCS. Or even just mostly sugars that didn't come from the berries.

The only problem here is that no part of your comment is true.

The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.

In fact, the only other ingredients are fruit pectin (the gelling agent) and citric acid (flavor), both of which must be present at very low levels.¹

Strawberries are the entire rest of the ingredients list. And they're also 25% of the sugar content, which is 12g of sugar per serving of which 9g is "added sugar". There's nothing even slightly misleading about this.

¹ Here's a make-your-own-jam page with rules of thumb for pectin in jam: https://missvickie.com/jam-pectin-calculator/ .

The recommendation for strawberry jam is 4 tsp of dry pectin per 4 cups of added sugar. There are 3 tsp in one tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in one cup, for a pectin-to-added-sugar ratio of 1:48. This suggests the jam is under 1% pectin, and the citric acid is even less.

> The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.

The point of this "article" is that they can break up the sugar ingredients so that it's possible for no single source of sugar to be more than the amount of strawberries, but to still have more sugars than strawberries and yet put strawberries first. I'm not saying that this particular jelly example does that, only that the rules would allow for it.

No jellymandering

Presumably you could just require % amounts to be specified (and make sure to pick volume vs weight in some fashion that avoids gaming).

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