Food/Groceries

Updated every Monday!   Subscribe to free weekly newsletter.

Fruit Roll-ups: Their “Strawberry” is Really…

Decades ago, General Mills introduced us to Fruit Roll-ups, a supposedly healthy snack “made with real fruit.” Indeed, below is a picture of an older box of strawberry Fruit Roll-ups, with the claims that it is “made from real fruit” and that it is “naturally flavored.”

Well, it seems that at least one consumer actually read the ingredients statement and was surprised by what she found.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Annie Lam was shocked to find that the strawberry snack she bought not only had no strawberries in it, it was actually made with pears, and a bunch of other additives and chemicals. And unlike most consumers who would shrug off this afront, she filed a class action lawsuit against the company.

General Mills asked that the suit be dismissed, but the judge ruled last week that it could go forward because:

“Reasonable consumers might be misled by packaging that claimed the snacks are ‘made with real fruit,’ and would not read the fine print.” — U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti

Updated every Monday!   Subscribe to free weekly newsletter.

Scott’s Tube-Free Toilet Paper Trick

In the never ending ways that toilet paper manufacturers have found to downsize their products, Kimberly Clark, the maker of Scott Tissue, came up with a new one.

Lauren B., a regular Mouse Print* reader, says she tried Scott’s new tube-free Naturals toilet paper and her whole family swears there is less on each roll.

A quick look at the packages of Naturals with tubes and Naturals without tubes reveals they both have 440 sheets per roll, the sheets are 4.2-inches by 4.0-inches on both, and both packages contain a total of 205.2 square feet of paper. It turns out that Lauren mistakenly thought that all Scott toilet paper had 1000 sheets, irrespective of the variety being sold. But her inquiry raised the question of whether the only difference in the case of Scott Naturals was that one had a tube and one did not.

As it turns out, a little secret was hiding in the fine print.

*MOUSE PRINT:

The tube-free version is only one-ply, and tube version is two. That difference would also suggest that you might have to use more sheets of the single-ply version than the two-ply one.

Updated every Monday!   Subscribe to free weekly newsletter.

No Joke: Ralphs Dropping Double Coupons on April 1

Ralphs, one of the largest supermarket chains in Southern California, is announcing major changes to its reward program this week. They have been teasing customers with advertisements like this:

There is one change, however, that they are not taking out full page ads to promote. Rather, they have buried the announcement in the fine print about something unrelated. And trust me, shoppers won’t be excited by the news.

*MOUSE PRINT:

They are dropping double coupons, a program they instituted over 20 years ago. [For those in parts of the country that don’t have supermarkets that offer double coupons, it works this way. The store will give you twice the face of the coupon when you buy the item, subject to certain limitations.]

Bargain hunters will be very unhappy, not to mention aspiring “extreme couponers”.

On Wednesday, March 28, please visit Consumer World for more details about what Ralphs’ dropping of double coupons could mean for shoppers across the country.