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.

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gruez 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	fwlr an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	nvme0n1p1 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	autoexec 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> it means disclosing their recipe “Natural flavors.” I doubt you can’t reverse engineer those fractions from a product and ingredient list anyway.
	▲	StevenWaterman 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Well if becomes law, not doing it is even more untenable
	▲	phyzome 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It works in the EU.
	▲	hn_throwaway_99 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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thaumasiotes 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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?

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autoexec 9 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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thaumasiotes 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	autoexec 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.