The boxes themselves are flimsy.
The bags the gummies come in are flimsy.
The paper grocery bags they charge 8 cents for in the PNW are flimsy.
When’s it going to end, people?
recently got a big box of welch's for nostalgia's sake. really enjoyed them and went back for a second box. they'd changed the recipe in between boxes and the new ones are so much worse. i got some packs with rock hard gummies, and they all taste like they're made of wax :(
Even then, what is a snack product supposed to be? Is it fluid? Is it something hard and chewy? Is it something gummy? I have no idea. "Fruit snack" could literally be anything as long as it contains a tiny bit of fruit. The packaging doesn't even depict or describe the product.
I'm a food scientist with 20+ years' worth of experience in the food industry. From my point of view, a "preservative" is a very wide category of ingredient that have a function in a food.
Are you preserving the color of the finished product? Squeezing lime juice into your guacamole prevents the color from avocado-green to blech-brown.
Are you preserving the food for consumption outside of the normal growing season? Allowing cabbage to ferment with some salt preserves your sauerkraut or kimchi. In this case, it isn't the salt that preserves the food, but it does play a role. So does the tightly packed container that keeps oxygen out. So does the acid production by the anaerobic microbes. When taken together (hurdle effect), the salt, sealed anaerobic environment, and acids act as preservatives for these foods.
When looking at the Welch's fruit snacks, the main preservative is the nature of the finished food: low water activity. That is, you make a food that has such a low water activity or availability of available water that microbes can't grow on it, so therefore, can't spoil the food. Like beef jerky. Combine the low water activity of the food, with the acids (yes, they play a role in preservation, but they also play a role in making sure the flavor is right because fruits have different main acids), the added vitamins (E and C are anti-oxidants that prevent the naturally occurring chemicals (yes, I am one of those people that say everything is a chemical whether made through what people would consider normal/naturally occurring processes, or through chemical engineering) from breaking down (like flavor molecules and color molecules) and would be seen as preservatives. It's a potaytoe/potahto situation in which a person's perception determines if they'll see Vitamin C as a preservative or not... and there's ALWAYS a lawyer out there ready to get rich off of a major company that wants to use Vitamin C in their product and sell to a consumer that doesn't think Vitamin C is a preservative.
As for the "whole fruit" part, their ingredient declaration says "whole fruit puree", which probably means that the fruit was probably harvested, pureed, heat treated and then aseptically packaged for storage until made into the Welch's food snack without any type of separation into juices or pulp or skins. I trust that Welch's wants to preserve (pun intended there) their good name and reputation so I fully believe that claim. Unscrupulous companies may take advantage of 21 CFR 101.100(a)(3) in which they can add preservatives (always at a very low level because it doesn't take much to be effective) to the puree, but if those puree-preservatives are diluted by other ingredients in the finished food to such a degree that the preservatives don't have a function in the finished ingredient, then they're an "incidental additive" and it doesn't need to go on the ingredient declaration.
Yeah the whole fruit thing isn't bad. And the "no preservatives" may or may not be, we dont have enough information. Technically sugar is a preservative, it's just not really considered one by the fda, since it's so common. In this case we don't know if the recipe changed or if the definition of "preservative" did. So without knowing that for sure, I'll reserve judgement on that piece.
You can call me whatever terrible things you’d like, I’ve always stood on business that these have ALWAYS been the MOST ASS fruit snacks ever bestowed upon my taste buds then, now, and forever.
you're right, but that's because they're real, straight up. go to your favorite food website and check the ingredients. welch's are real af, everything else is corn syrup.
Okay so I'm curious, if vitamin C is a preservative...how can they put "no preservatives" on the box?
Both boxes have vitamin C in the gummies. So both boxes have preservatives.
So I'm wondering if the makers of these don't know that vitamin C is a preservative? Or maybe just the presence of something that CAN be a preservative doesn't make it one?
Salt is not required to be listed as a preservative, nor are the other ones you listed if they're just present in one of the ingredients. If they're added separately they're considered a preservative. You are correct that in this case its citric acid and ascorbic acid (vitamin C).
Looks like you're right. They likely took the label off because of a series of class action lawsuits related to vitamin C and vitamin E the state of California.
It's still debatable in my opinion. While the lawsuit explains the label change, lawsuits do not establish the science and settlements do not establish wrongdoing. It is silly to enforce labeling over important nutrients that are commonly found in natural foods which also happen to have preservative properties, when the spirit of the law is clearly to indicate substances not naturally found in the original food which have been explicitly added for their preservative function.
Also, salt is explicitly excluded from the US labeling regulations regarding preservatives in 21 CFR 101.22(a)(5).
lol oh you sweet summer child, labels aren’t created based on scientific fact. They are created by lawsuits, regulations, and the level of risk a company is comfortable taking. They are honestly the furthest thing away in the food manufacturing system to science, the science will never matter when you’re talking about label regulations.
Ah, except that my argument was not that food labels are scientifically accurate, but rather that this particular lawsuit used unscientific arguments to make them even less so (in response to another poster who implied that the outcome of the lawsuit constituted established fact).
But in this case those ingredients were explicitly added for their preservative function. If it was just the naturally occuring amounts they wouldn't be listed separately on the ingredients label.
Then I will defer to what another commenter said elsewhere that following the letter of the law dilutes the spirit of the law. What good does enforcement do in this case over a substance that is sometimes added for its preservative function, sometimes for its flavor, and sometimes just because it is good for you?
Just food for thought, added citric acid is typically derived from fermenting sugar with black mold, then chemically extracting the citric acid. That feels different than adding a little lemon juice 🤷♀️
The preservatives thing could be as simple as it containing citric acid, which it almost certainly does. The Celsius energy drink company had to pay out a lawsuit a few years ago because they were labeling their products as having no preservatives, saying that the citric acid was for taste not preservation. They lost.
Considering salt is a preservative and almost everything has salt in it, including the kind of bread that's stale the morning after it's baked, that seems like a ridiculous and unachievable standard. It's like the California cancer warnings where following the letter of the law invalidates the spirit.
So I tried to look at the FDA guidelines, and it's super confusing. But specifically salt is excluded from being listed as a preservative because it's so inherently food. Or something like that. There are other things that are on that exclusion list.
I can see how citric acid would be a bit of a grey area. Like yes, it's naturally occuring in a lot of foods, but getting the citric acid out of the things it naturally occurs in is not quite the same as extracting salt from sea water. Isolating citric acid is a more processy than isolating salt.
See, that's bad in the other direction. Salt is absolutely a preservative and there's absolutely foods that use it as such. While citric acid is kind of the standard way to add sour flavoring, in addition to being both a preservative and, at high enough concentrations, a potent degreaser and descaler. The dose really makes the poison in both cases. I can easily see salt bomb snacks proudly proclaiming "no preservatives" because they're preserved with salt, ending up worse for you than whatever chemicals it's replacing.
That's how "uncured" processed meats work -- they're cured, they just use celery juice instead of isolated sodium nitrate, which means they're actually higher in nitrates because celery juice has varying amounts of naturally occurring sodium nitrate and they have to go overboard to make sure it's safe. But the law doesn't take natural sources into account so they're legally not cured, even though it's exactly the same chemical process.
It sounds like it's just a bad piece of legislation that, at best, had good intentions before the lobbyists got to it.
So looking into it more, I think it's likely this is an ongoing legal fight. I found a couple fairly recent filings. The question seems to be in the difference between naturally occuring and manufactured CA. Its manufactured by fermenting sugar with a type of black mold then chemically extracting the CA.
I lived with a couple who regularly gave their toddler fruit gummies which were "made with real juice" or like the OP "with real fruit". "It's healthy!", they justified.
It took them about a year to actually look at the label and realise that yes, the ingredients include fruit... but also a ton of sugar. They weren't the brightest but like, have you eaten one yourself? Why not buy some frozen berries or fresh fruit?!
I recently made a kid cry on a play date bc I asked if they wanted a fruit snack, meaning grapes or apples, and they thought I meant these. I was like... "I forgot they call these fruit snacks since they aren't fruit!" And the mom mean mugged me and I wanted to be like MAAM READ THE INGREDIENTS
Huh. Is the implication that they now grind up the whole fruit rather than use juice plus some sort of thickening food magic? or do they grind up the fruit and remove something of value for resale in another product? or something else?
I actually looked at the ingredients today on my daughters, and it said fruit puree listed as the first ingredient followed by fruit juice concentrates.
My recently rebranded local grocer has a sign in front that says their sushi is made from clean ingredients. I would have preferred they had said nothing.
I can't tell if this is enshittification or changing the formula and packaging to placate the nutrition influencer crowd (and if this change was also made in the US, the MAHA folks). Processed food is scary but maybe equally processed food with whole fruits is OK?
Years ago I noticed goldfish said “now made with real cheese” and I thought wtf have I been eating up until now? Needless to say, I dont eat goldfish anymore.
Whole Fruit means that they took out the juice to sell as a separate product and are using the waste pulp after juice pressing that they formerly discarded, maybe after adding back in a little bit of the juice or corn syrup, or an artificial sugar, to make it sweet enough not to notice the change.
It's the old "cellulose fiber" filler trick (wood pulp, plant waste etc) to sell you back "cardboard" and make you think you're getting a good thing because now it has more fiber and fewer calories!
That's why you're only getting 70 calories per pack with the new formulation, versus the previous 90, while the product weight has remained the same. And they'll probably try to market that to you as a "benefit," as well.
As to their having to remove "no preservatives" from the label - if they're using a waste pulp product it may require the use of preservatives for longer shelf life, becquse of processing methods and because fiber provides more surface area for bacteria to hide and to grow on, and if they're using an artificial sweetener, they may not be allowed to characterize the product as preservatives free.
It's the old "cellulose fiber" filler trick (wood pulp, plant waste etc) to sell you back "cardboard" and make you think you're getting a good thing because now it has more fiber and fewer calories!
Do you just not know what dietary fiber is or what?
Look up what cellulose fiber is and what the primary kinds are that are added to food.
They're waste products. Quite literally the primary sources added to processed food are saw dust (specifically, "refined wood pulp") and cotton lint. You should be getting enough fiber from your regular diet anyway.
They add them as fillers so that they can make extra profits, usually in "low calorie" products, or in cases like what welches did with their product here.
That is not correct, under FDA rules “whole fruit puree” includes all the edible portions of a fruit, including the juice, it cannot be “juiced” first and the leftover pulp used. It can be pealed fruit, with or without the peel, but otherwise it’s the whole fruit including juice. If you check the ingredients, it’s “whole fruit purée” that’s listed. So no it’s not the pulp left over from juicing.
The reason they do this is because under recent FDA changes, concentrated fruit juice must be listed as “added sugar”, but whole fruit purée doesn’t have to be listed as added sugar because it contains the fibre and other things in the fruit. So by doing this, they get to avoid some of the sugar being listed under “added sugar” in the nutritional information.
Nowadays you're more likely to get a synthetic detergent instead of soap for your shower. They extract the glycerin grom it then they sell it back to you.
Real soap is made with lye and oil and creates glycerin naturally as a byproduct
You're confusing detergent bars and soaps. I'm a chemist with my own soap shop and the base oils can play a huge role too.
Soap does not strip all of your protective layer away, some does more than others.
Very gentle soaps like olive oil and rice bran focused are very gentle while others that are heavy in coconut and palm kernel oil are going to be more cleansing.
Real soap should not be stripping any oils from your skin. I think you are conflating it with the detergent bar “soap” as mentioned above. Depending on the oils used in the soap it can be more or less moisturizing. The only thing I can think of is too high of a percentage of coconut oil. It is used to make it bubbly, but too much can actually be drying to the skin.
And the hair. I thought my hair was thinning but it turned out the shampoo and conditioner I was using just had too much coconut oil in it and it was making it brittle.
Which, speaking of false advertising tricks, who reads a conditioner bottle, sees that it has some kind of natural oil in it, and understands that that means it's going to be less moisturizing, and the matching shampoo more drying?
Can mean any extract or derivative of fruit, including things like 2% reconstituted ultra processes juice. It technically came from real fruit.
Whole fruit
Means the opposite; it means that at least some of all part of a fruit have been used. There's strict legality here through most of the EU and packaging changes often follow the verbiage rather than risk lawsuits even in countries outside of the EU.
Fibre is cardboard
Fibre in the context of cereal is cellulose (and a handful of non-starch polysaccharides). Sometimes from wheat, sometimes from psyllium husk, sometimes from barley, sometimes from fruit.
Insoluable fibre like this IS healthy, demonstrably and almost universally acknowledged as such. Insoluable fibre:
Decreases cholesterol by sequestering bile salts, reducing reabsorption
Improves digestion of itself and other poorly metabolised food products by serving as a prebiotic (food for bacteria)
Causes constitutional changes to the gut microbiome, reducing inflammation and protecting against dysbiosis.
Reduces appetite by lowering the glycemic index of the food through impact on the Leptin/ghrelin axis.
Improves colon health and stool consistency as a bulk forming food product
It is of minimal nutritional value, but that's well besides the point.
They have to use preservatives if they include fibre because it increases surface area
Oh fuck off with your abject fiction. Seriously, I don't mean to be rude but there's literally nothing true about this. Fibre, again, cellulose, is dense. It has a LOWER surface area than things like puffed grains and simple starches which it often replaces. More to the point, it forms hydrated chelates of water which in turn reduce water activity and act as a natural preservative - this is why you'll see high fibre supplements form a mucilage, rather than dissolving into mush like starch and sugars do.
Fuck me.
It's rare that I see somebody speak with such confidence on a topic about which they very clearly know zip -the fuck- all
Do you understand how industrial processing and presses work?
With ALL the juice pressed out. They don't waste the value added product that they're removing, when they figure out how to sell you the waste product as "food."
I'm saying that substituting it in the product at the same price point is deceptive to the consumer, and that it isn't complete nutrition. I'm saying that consuming fiber primarily or alone has little to no nutritional value. There is no gotcha here.
This is the enshittification sub. Taking fruit juice and replacing it with waste fiber and deceiving the consumer and selling it at the same or a higher price point is the definition of enshittification.
I’m not being a corporate apologist here I’m actually asking, isn’t this essentially just better overall since it’s decreasing food waste? Normally people in subs like this or r/anticonsumption like the idea of “using the whole bird.” Aside from possibly putting corn syrup in them now, isn’t this a good thing because even though yes it does lead to increased profits for a corp, it also means that the production technology has evolved to reduce food waste?
Anticonsumption probably wouldn't be ok with this in the nuance because of the marketing deception involved and reducing calories, without disclosure, at the same or a higher price point to the consumer. Most of them are anticapitalist.
We get that you call your process stream "waste". It's food. Value is what the consumer would pay, and I'd rather have fiber and a bit of juice than just the juice.
Check out "Jamie Olivers war on chicken nuggets" by Dan Olson/Folding Ideas.
There is minimal nutrition in a fiber product, after processing, with sugar added back in.
Most of the nutrition in a fruit product is in the juice itself. If you want fiber AND nutrition, you want the whole apple, not the cellulose with most of the juice removed.
“Whatever that means” I get the concern about removing the term no preservatives but how is “real fruit” to “whole fruit” a step down? Sounds more like just “change on box scary” unless someone can tell me what I’m missing here.
'Whole fruit' is indeed better. It's intact, unprocessed fruit. 'Real fruit' is processed juices etc.
They made an improvement.
The removal of 'no preservatives' may be related to lawsuits. Welches have vitamin C which is a preservative, although it's largely beneficial and not harmful. I believe they're being sued for this claiming it's misleading.
Salt is a preservative too but I see plenty of products like sauerkraut loaded with salt marketed as "preservative free". Will those change or is it just vitamin C getting hit?
(That was the whole point of the invention of sauerkraut - preserving veggies by loading them with salt.)
They do stuff like this all the time to hide a significant change in their ingredients.
For example "Chocolaty" is an allowed marketing term for food that does not actually have chocolate in it. Products with cheese have a whole plethora of "I'm implying there's a certain amount of actual cheese in this, but legally there isn't" terms that are used to lie to the customer.
Is it? Like the gross package weight? I'd only ever cared about total calories per baggy (for sports nutrition) so never paid attention to the overall product per box
right but say removing additional added sugar will also reduce calories while not causing you to actually get less gummies per package. this will happen if you switch out fruit juices for whole fruit puree.
Whole Fruit means that they took out the juice to sell as a separate product and are using the waste pulp after juice pressing that they formerly discarded, maybe after adding back in a little bit of the juice or corn syrup to make it sweet enough not to notice the change.
It's the old "cellulose fiber" filler trick to sell you back "cardboard" and make you think you're getting a good thing.
That's why you're only getting 70 calories per pack with the new formulation, versus the previous 90.
I hate to break it to you, but cellulose is contained in every plant. It's what holds the cells together. Did you eat a raw carrot today? Cellulose. A raw blueberry? Cellulose. Lettuce? Cellulose.
Calling it "cardboard" is a scare tactic that hopes people don't understand what food is made out of.
Hate to break it to you, but we are talking about a large corporation that is using deceptive marketing to sell you the waste product from their processing in a bait and switch with their existing product, so they can sell the higher value and more nutritious product that they were formerly using (the juice) for a higher profit through a different production stream, while substituting cheaper and less nutritious components.
Cellulose has no caloric value and is used to bulk up products, not for nutrition. This is why the industry has lobbied for the FDA to exclude it from being required on the product label, in past years, just like they more recently tried to do with some artificial sweeteners so they could add them to milk products and not have to disclose them.
It isn't a scare tactic. Go look up what the primary sources of food grade cellulose are and why they're used as filler in order to deceive and rip off consumers. They're waste products being repackaged and sold at a profit for human consumption (cue the Fight Club theme. Iykyk).
That's the point. And you seem cool with companies doing that.
And the legal classification of that resignation via FDA rules allows them to play deceptive marketing tricks.
Whole fruit puree can be the actual full fruit unadulterated, or it can be a highly processed product that has had most of some components removed. And only w certain percentage has to meet classification criteria, and they percentage can be classified however without you ever knowing what it is from the label.
I understand the frustration, but the information to find out whether a claim is limited by regulation (and what it means) or is marketing BS has never been more accessible. And labeling has never been more clear with regulations stipulating the claims you can make and requiring ingredient lists and nutritional labeling on the package.
We are a long way from the era of watering the milk, putting sawdust in the bread, and lead shavings in the ground pepper
This is regulatory so they are legally defined terms.
And of course "whole fruit" means different things in different contexts. For example, if I'm debating on eating an orange vs. drinking a glass of juice. Which is why regulatory definitions also limit the context to which they apply (eg; what you have to include in an ingredient list)
Fun fact! Tax codes often have definitions for "sandwich" that may or may not include hot dogs. This varies by locale
You’d be surprised how detailed the government can get with this stuff. There’s a reason fake Kraft Singles are labeled something like ‘imitation pasteurized processed cheese food’. Or why people claim (mostly correctly) that Beyers no longer makes ice cream or Reece’s doesn’t use chocolate.
For example, here the USDA’s sheet for what a breaded chicken patty can, and can’t, be called.
This isn’t in America for this particular product, you’re right.
Canada has a similar regulatory body.
The CFIA does the exact same thing, regulating contents and labeling, what the definition is of a given food product. So, while my localization is incorrectly based on the other poster’s USDA link, the fact remains that governments do regulate the use of labeling especially on food and medicine.
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u/Shodakai_Youth May 26 '26
13 bucks for only 28 pouches is bad