Is it nuts to assume a scoop of pistachio ice cream should contain actual pistachios? Or how about real butter in a dish of butter pecan?
Such weighty questions about a favorite summertime confection could soon be decided by the courts.
A federal judge in New York has given the go-ahead to a Long Island woman’s class action lawsuit that claims consumers are being duped by Cold Stone Creamery when they purchase certain flavors that “do not contain their represented ingredients.”
Lead plaintiff Jenna Marie Duncan purchased her serving of pistachio ice cream from a Cold Stone Creamery store in Levittown, New York, in or around July 2022. According her lawsuit, Duncan “reasonably believed that the Pistachio ice cream she purchased from defendant contained pistachio.”
I’m sure all that will happen is they’ll change the label to say “pistachio flavored ice cream” lol
That’s still a win though, because nobody will be duped into paying a premium for artificial flavoring.
A related label that pisses me off is “zero sugar” when artificial sweeteners are used. I like sparkling water, in large part because it has absolutely no sweetener of any kind in it, but sometimes in a hurry I grab one of these pieces of shit and it really pisses me off.
Zero sugar is a correct label in that case
So is “artificially sweetened”, “natural sweeteners added” or any host of other, more useful descriptors.
Product nutrition labels are not the place for “it’s technically correct” phrasing.
That description doesn’t communicate if there is any sugar (calories) in it or not. That label would be accurate on a zero calorie or full calorie beverage.
The term you’re looking for is “unsweetened”. That tells you there’s no natural or artificial sweeteners in it.
I understand this. My point is “zero sugar” and “no sugar” are obtuse terms and much better ones exist.
Using a man-made sweetener? Call it artificially sweetened.
Using a natural sweetener other than sugar? Say so, it’s not hard and also less of a misdirection than the phrasing they like to use.
I think you’re looking at these labels thinking they are there to solve your problem of labeling a beverage that isn’t sweet (by any means). They aren’t.
These labels are there because most buyers of beverages are interested in if they contain calories or not. So the “zero sugar” clearly solves that.
Unless enough buyers are like you that they are seeking an unsweetened beverage, you’re out of luck looking for every beverage to be labeled as “sweet” or “not sweet”.
You’re probably right. Part of the reason it sets me off is because I assume they’re doing it on purpose. Maybe they are and I’m (partially) justified and maybe I’m attributing malice to stupidity or however that saying goes.
Fortunately this is a relatively infrequent occurrence as I’ve found the products I like. But god damn does it upset me when I pick up the wrong thing.
I don’t think they’re trying to trick people into drinking sweet drinks. I think they’re trying to appeal to their largest customer base (calorie conscious buyers). There is limited attention buyers have, so drink makers have to be careful not to put too much, so their most important parts of their message get through. In this case “zero sugar”. They are probably aware that some people like yourself end up with something you don’t like, but they just don’t care because it doesn’t negatively effect enough people for their sales to suffer.
So not really malice, or stupidity on their part, but apathy. They likely know, they just don’t care.
Just gotta look for “unsweetened.”
It is wild to me how many flavored waters are sweetened. The unsweetened ones are perfectly fine, why do they need to be so saccharine?
I do look for that, but sometimes I’m not paying 100% attention (the fact that I need laser focus to fucking buy water is another issue).
It also doesn’t help when manufacturers use shrinkflation as an opportunity to update their packaging (is this a new product or just a smaller version of the old one?)
It ALSO doesn’t help that they love to put the saccharine shit - sorry, the “artificially sweetened” - nope, not right either - the “sweetened with something that’s not sugar” crap right next to the water. They want it to be healthy-by-association. It needs to be next to the sodas though, since it’s a drink for people looking for an alternatively sweet product. Those of us looking for water aren’t interested in it, which all adds up to making me think their marketing plan is to get people to buy it on accident.
I know people who genuinely don’t like stuff like LaCroix because they say there isn’t enough flavor, and instead drink the sickly sweet swill like “Sparkling Ice.” My best man is like this. There are many things about him I cannot comprehend, and this is one of them.
So the market certainly exists.
** no actual pistachios were used for flavor.
No pistachios were harmed in the making of this ice cream.
But… did the tree scream?
I scream, ewe scream.
Introducing new PistaSHEO ® ice cream, only from Cold Stone!
It’s also cold stone, so you can get a mix-in of pistachios and actually have real pistachios in your pistachio flavored ice cream.
Also: Now I wonder if the cheese cake ice cream has cheese cake in it. I usually assume everything is artificially flavored unless it’s plain chocolate or vanilla.
Vanilla is a pretty expensive spice and vanillin can be synthesized from oil or wood, you should probably assume most things vanilla flavored are artificially flavored. There is way more demand for vanilla than the amount of vanilla pods grown in the world.
Also, the little flecks of vanilla bean in ice cream is often not vanilla bean.
Nor, as I have learned, are there sufficient strawberries in the world to flavor the “strawberry” ice consumed in the US.
Luckily, one can create “natural strawberry flavor” by pressure cooking pine wood shavings in alcohol.
I think this has me on the fence.
Cold Stone mixes the ice cream in front of you. Like, that’s the schtick. To make that easier, their ice cream doesn’t have any nuts or candies or anything already mixed in.
So they can’t add actual pistachios to their pistachio ice cream. They could use natural pistachio flavor, but I understand why they don’t.
Anything that is artificially flavored should be properly labelled, so I think this is a valid lawsuit. But I would have expected that Cold Stone uses artificial flavors in most of their ice cream.
Pistachio ice cream doesn’t have large pieces of pistachio in it. It has pistachio that’s been blended into a paste and mixed with ice cream. Like how creamy peanut butter doesn’t have chunks of peanut in it but peanuts are still the main ingredient.
I don’t usually get pistachio ice cream, but I remember having some that had pistachio pieces in it. Thinking back, I would guess that the pistachio pieces were there to lend authenticity to the artificially flavored neon-green ice cream. And I know I’ve had ice cream with peanuts in it. Rocky Road maybe? Or maybe a Ben and Jerry’s flavor.
In fact, the pistachio pieces in the green stuff could have been peanuts for all I know.