You're only supposed to eat half of that!
Cardiff Blogger is on a diet. He needs to lose a stone in the next couple of months to reach his target weight of 12.5st. This won’t be an easy target, especially if Tescos are involved.
I went to Tescos last night to buy a salad and a drink, nice and healthy yes? When I was in the shop I picked up a salad and a bottle of Oasis, noticed that the fat content on the salad was 25% of the RDA – high, but not bad for a main meal and the drink had a pretty low amount of sugar too. I went home and munched it all up, yummy I thought…until my partner looked closely at the label. Both the percentages were for ‘a serving’ which counted as half the prawn salad and half the 500ml bottle of Oasis. Since when was this honest?
This is tantamount to lying, yes I should have looked a little closer but this is seriosly misleading for people in a hurry or those who just look at the percentages and nothing more. Since when did someone go to a shop and have to work out what a ‘portion’ was, since when did you buy a bottle of Oasis and only drink half and since when did you buy a small prawn salad and only be expected to eat half?
The percentages on the side of a product’s packaging should show how much of the RDA the entire product is, only if it is individually packaged within the outer packaging or it’s obviously meant to be shared (such as a cake or bag of frozen chips) should it be a fraction. Let this be a warning to you all, check the labels very closely!
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Check food labels very closely!
I really disagree, it’s your own responsibility to check, and if it annoys you so much don’t buy the product.
But deliberately misleading just so it looks like it’s healthy when it really isn’t is deceptive mis-selling.
As much as a dislike red tape, I do think this is a clear case of misleading labelling.
Being in roughly the same diet situation, I am also calorie counting and also only recently noticed that the 300 calorie meal is actually 600 calories as it is presumed I would split the single portion into two.
The problem is – how do you solve the issue?
Is there a set standard for what “a serving” should contain, or should packages be required to list several variants based on size, total contents, suggested serving etc?
I quite agree with you unless the front of the salad said meal for two, of family salad, you would expect it to be an indivual protion.
As for 500ml of Oasis OK it is bigger than the 330ml that you get in a can of carbonated drink, but yeah you’d expect to drink that in one sitting if you had purchased it not consuime only 250ml of it.
I can assume that the salad was Tesco’s own brand so they can take the blame but Oasis purchase that drink with their own misleading assumptions of portions to all the major outlets and many minor ones.
IanVisits – I totally agree with you. I hate red tape but I think that if you’re going to put percentages on a product then you should at least do it honestly with good intentions.
Yeah the salad just said “prawn layered salad” so I’ll blame Tesco for that, whereas the Oasis one, despite saying ‘light’ is only light if you consume half of it. Tastes bloody nice though!
Totally agree with you. This is misleading. It’s not the same with everything but a lot of things; Packaging quotes anything from “one sixth,” “one third” or “half” of individual packs. Even on the back of packaging the figures cited often only refer to 100g of said item.
I always check the labels rather carefully and I’m not being rude when I ask how you can expect Tesco’s ‘average’ customer base to adopt some impromptu math skills when it comes to working out how much fat is in, say, 275g of the entire product if the label states 16.3g for every 100g. That’s not taking into consideration the the product could be split between a family of four.
Baffling, isn’t it? Tesco (and admittedly other supermarkets) routinely get away with deftly disguising how bad some of it’s purportedly ‘healthy’ products are.
Reading this reminds me why I abhor Tesco so much, especially after reading Tescopoly last year. You have inspired me to blog about Tesco now; The evil, insidious pillagers that they are.
If only everything was Waitrose!
[...] around a dreary, carbon copied, soul-destroying warehouse of convenience. I recently read a post by Cardiff_Blogger which made me realise that I wasn’t alone with my concern for how deft and [...]
Cardiff blogger I totally agree, making a label on a food item look as if they are healthy is a bit of a con and now I check the labels more often in closer details.
David.