Label Trickery

I ate a frozen fish dinner tonight. (It wasn’t frozen when I ate it, of course.) The name on the box was Hawaiian Garlic Salmon. I never even knew there was such a thing as Hawaiian garlic. Is the garlic grown in Hawaii? Or is the salmon grown in Hawaii? Or both?

The box’s nutrition label was one of those that, while perhaps truthful, was also somewhat deceptive. At the very least, it was intended to make it difficult to understand what the customer is getting.

If you’re a food shopper, you’ve probably seen nutrition labels that state the package contains 2½ servings. Or 3½ servings. Or 4½ servings. Who divides a package of food in such a way that two people get full servings and one person gets a half serving? No one! The purpose of the extra half serving is to make the calorie count a little smaller. If you’re counting calories and you pick up the can or package in the grocery store and read the nutrition label, you’ll see the per serving calorie count and think, “that’s not so bad.”

But the garlic salmon label went further. It stated the calorie count per serving was 236. But how many servings are in the box? And how large is a serving? Here’s what the nutrition label stated (in very fine print):

Serving size: 4 oz (about ⅔ of 1 Fillet)
Servings per container: about 3

Are there 3 fillets inside the box? You might assume 3 because there are 3 servings. (The number isn’t stated on the box.) In reality, there are 2 vacuum-packed sealed-in-plastic frozen fillets. Those two fillets are your three servings. But no one is likely to eat ⅔ of a fillet. Realistically, a serving is 1 fillet. At a glance, how many calories are in that fillet?

If you stop and think about it, you must increase the calorie count by 50%. Because 1 fillet is half again more than ⅔ of 1 fillet. Of course, in the store you don’t know how many fillets are in the box. But let’s suppose you have figured out the number of fillets by multiplying the serving size, ⅔ of 1 fillet, by the servings per container, 3. In the noisy store, with a shopping list in one hand and the frozen fish in the other hand, are you going to stop and do the math? Will you even notice the very fine print about a serving being ⅔ of a fillet?

If there are two frozen fillets vacuum-sealed in heavy plastic, why does the box say there are three servings? The food company is playing games. They’re obfuscating the facts.

There are many ways to deceive someone while being truthful. Suppose you ask me how much money I have in the bank and I tell you, “In all honesty, all my bank accounts added together total less than 4 million dollars.” You may leave thinking, “Wow. I didn’t know VirtualWayne had that much money in the bank,” and all the while I may have one bank account with 50 bucks in it. I told you the truth in a way that was intended to mislead you. Some of these giant food companies are doing a similar thing: they’re telling you the truth (supposedly) but they’re doing it in a way that is intended to mislead you — or at least make it difficult to figure out, on the spot, what you’re getting.

This pet peeve annoys me partly because it’s used so often, and partly because giant food companies think we’re too stupid to notice their little game. Well, giant food companies, this consumer is telling you that while we may buy your products, we buy them despite the misleading labels, not because of them. There is a well known saying, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

We’re on to your little game, giant food companies. And as Queen Victoria said, “We are not amused.”