the essential
The Foodwatch association, which advocates for the right of consumers to be offered quality food, without health risks and with reliable and transparent labeling, canvassed the supermarket shelves in anticipation of the holiday menu. She pins five products.
The food industry never seems to lack imagination. We have seen this in recent months with food inflation. Several manufacturers have invented the shrinkflationthat is to say the reduction in the quantity of product in packaging which does not change and for the same price. Although legal, this practice is controversial because the consumer cannot detect it when purchasing. Distributors in medium and large stores must, since 1is July 2024, inform the consumer of the consumer products affected by this practice.
Consumers were also faced with the stretchflationwhich consists of increasing the weight of a product… while increasing its price per kilo or per liter. They even had to endure the cheapflationthat is to say “the degradation of the quality of a product – nutritional, namely the energy value, the content of lipids, proteins, vitamins or organoleptic linked to the appearance, taste, flavor – and the increase in its price per liter or per kilo”, according to the consumer defense association Foodwatch.
These detestable practices obviously continue around Christmas products as Foodwatch has just shown. Like every year, the association scoured the supermarket shelves in anticipation of the holiday menu, and asked consumers to vote for “the worst scam on the label among five products”. A track record that she calls the “pans of gold.” »
Raspberry chocolates… without raspberries
First pinned product, “L’Escargot Lanvin” from Nestlé, raspberry flavor… which does not contain raspberries, not even raspberry flavoring according to the list of ingredients.
Second product highlighted: Tipiak’s Bouchées pâtissières. “While their packaging sprinkled with festive glitter promises a golden and crispy puff pastrya gourmet offerthe bites contain, not butter as we expect, but palm oil, this fatty material that is controversial for human rights, the planet and our health,” laments Foodwatch.
Third candidate for the golden casserole, the Maître Coq capon roast with morels. “In this roast capon stuffed with morels and old armagnac, you have to find them, the morels: 0.3% of this mushroom, yet damn well put forward in images,” mocks the association.
Fourth product that will speak to the Occitans that we are: the block of Gourmet duck foie gras with Sauternes from Maison Montfort. “While nitrites are gradually disappearing from the foie gras shelves, this brand persists in using them” points out Foodwatch, which emphasizes that “Maison Montfort knows how to do without them since its foie gras Authentic does not contain any. And to specify that “when added nitrites and nitrates are ingested, they can contribute to the formation of probable carcinogenic compounds and promote the appearance of colorectal cancer (the second most fatal cancer after lung cancer) and lung cancer. ‘stomach. »
Finally, the last product pinned this year is the Delpeyrat foie gras balsamic vinegar cream. Foodwatch denounces its exorbitant price of €56.25 per liter, claiming to have “found a balsamic vinegar cream with a similar composition, organic, almost half cheaper per liter. » The association also highlights this vinegar cream because it “contains a controversial health additive, the coloring E150d, ammonium sulphite caramel, which may contain a compound likely to be carcinogenic. »
Advice from the DGCCRF
“These examples show it clearly: the regulations are too lax and allow these abuses. We publicly expose these brands which cheat and whose image seems to matter more than transparency,” explains Audrey Morice, campaigns manager at foodwatch France.
For its part, the General Directorate for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) issued its advice to the French on December 6 with a selection of its surveys and practical fact sheets (caviar, chocolates, foie gras, oysters, turkeys, salmon, etc.) to be found on the internet.
“Read labels and ingredient lists to find out the percentages of quality raw materials present. The higher an ingredient is on the list, the more it is present in the final product. Official quality labels and signs make it possible to recognize a food product (IGP, Red label, etc.),” explains the DGCCRF.
