Food/Groceries

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Bucking the Trend, This Company Upsized its Products

Since Mouse Print* began in 2006, we have featured product after product that has been downsized. Manufacturers remove an ounce here and there, and for paper products, they shave off fractions of an inch in width or length, or reduce the number of sheets provided.

Now comes Ken’s Steak House salad dressing. Looking at the picture on the left, the bottle on the left appears bigger than the one on the right, and one might conclude that they too have just downsized. Surprise, the opposite is true.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Ken’s actually added an ounce of dressing to their traditional eight ounce bottle when they made the switch from glass to plastic bottles. This was a deliberate move by this family-run company to buck the downsizing trend.

Too bad they missed the opportunity to tout the fact on the bottle that they are now giving the consumer more at the same old price. (They had limited space, and couldn’t figure out how to best communicate that fact according to a spokesperson for the company.) In the comments below, feel free to offer your suggestions.

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Where’s the Juice? (Part 2)

Motts, the apple juice people, have been running a feel good commercial for their Motts for Tots product claiming their product has 40% less sugar than regular apple juice.

Did they come up with some revolutionary scientific discovery to remove sugar from apple juice?

*MOUSE PRINT:

Nope. It was a very natural solution. They diluted it with water. A lot of water. And if parents just grab the product without reading the label carefully, they may think they are doing a good thing for their kids when they are probably not.

*MOUSE PRINT:

The nutrition label suggests it might be diluted with about 46% water (in addition to the water necessary to dilute the apple juice concentrate). They did add a shot of vitamin C, however, to make the product more nutritious.

So since you are now buying a product that is almost half water, they’ve undoubtedly cut the price, right? Nope. A half gallon of their diluted product is the same price as 100% pure apple juice.

Motts is not alone is selling a watered-down product and touting the benefit of less sugar and calories. Tropicana has been promoting its “Trop50” product that way for the past several years.

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Who Knew Cookies Could be Nutritious?

Last week a commercial for a new product Whonu? cookies began airing nationally. It basically contends that its cookies are a healthy choice for consumers.

On their website, but a little less so in the commercial, the company makes an array of nutrition claims comparing itself not only to oatmeal and milk, but also to the vitamins in blueberries, spinach, carrot juice, tomato juice, cottage cheese, and fruit:


*MOUSE PRINT: Those little asterisks lead to a fine print disclosure on the website, and a similar one in the TV commercial, which is visible for only three seconds:

So, you have to eat three cookies to get the nutrition they claim. However, when looking at the nutrition label for their Oreo-like cookies, one discovers that it contains only three grams of fiber, not four, as one would find in a serving of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats. And all the other vitamins and minerals are mostly in the 10% range (with a few up to 30%) of one’s daily requirement.

The bigger problem in our view is not quibbling over the claims referring to one cookie or three cookies, or the amount of fiber. Rather, it would be an unfortunate result to have people think they could eat these cookies as a substitute for all the healthy foods they compared them to, which obviously, as a whole, provide much more nutrition than these vitamin-spiked snacks.