... and this is why people with severe allergies always always always read the ingredients list, even if the packaging has not changed. And always carry emergency medication.
This includes even very big name brands, such as Doritos. For a long time, Doritos was gluten free in nearly all of its flavors except its "default" Nacho Cheese flavor. Suddenly and silently, it went gluten free. I don't know exactly when because I wasn't looking. I was actually trying to show someone that only that flavor had the wheat in it, except the bag went and contradicted my claim. I may have missed it but I don't think they ever publicized it, or if they did, it wasn't much. (Contrast, for instance, Corn Chex which has talked about being gluten free on its box now for years after it changed.)
Imitation crab meat is another example; it has gone from reliably containing wheat, to unreliably being gluten free depending on brand, to what appears to be converging on generally not containing wheat, just in the past few years. I'll still be checking labels for a while on that one, though.
(And before the inevitable commenter pops up: The things that I do not know whether they contain wheat are, pretty much by definition, the highly-processed foods high in refined carbs, so my examples have a selection bias in that direction. I do not eat either of the things I mention often or in quantity. But I'm not always 100% in charge of my food environment and it is nice at someone else's party to be able to eat something sometimes.)
Later, it jumped, and he was upset about the change, and contacted Tesco - turns out they change the mix for each batch based on the price of certain beans - if the sweeter beans are more expensive, they put in more of the others and add more sugar to try and keep the taste consistent, while keeping costs low.
It makes sense, but it is a pain for people with dietary restrictions (or just those trying to track their intake accurately).
Do people pretend to have celiacs? God why?
Then you get people who reason themselves into "Gluten-free!" must be a good thing! I blame the "____-free" moniker often being related to "healthier for you" diets. People will seek out "gluten-free" and there have been cases of restaurants serving "gluten-free" food that wasn't actually "gluten-free".
I've heard a number of cases from actual gluten sensitive individuals who have a love/hate relationship with this fad.
1) More gluten-free things to choose from! Yay!
2) More "gluten-free" things that can potentially kill them, causing them to have to be even more careful than they already were with what they choose to eat! Boo!
Good find!
But as have been indicated here http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35727244 , this may be counterproductive.
My friend has celiac, my co-worker is mildly allergic to wheat, I'm sensitive to gluten.
Too much gluten makes me gassy so I avoid large quantities, but that's pretty much it. My co-worker breaks out in hives. My friend is in for a world of hurt.
But at this point in my life, it also no longer matters for me. It is certainly the case that I must avoid gluten now. And, alas, to the extent that it matters for my children, they're almost certainly also going to be biologically-grown-up before we have any solid answers either. In the meantime I just do my best for them.
- price of product
- food mass of product
Those vary invisibly all the time, and it'd be great to have a record of it.
After talking to people about it though, it became apparent that most grocery shoppers already have an idea of where they are going to buy groceries, making location more important than price. It's a razor thin industry, and even the price-sensitive coupon-using folks almost always just go to the closest Safeway equivalent.
So many food brands are now just meaningless words in someone's brand portfolio. Especially silly when the two main competitors for an item turn out to now be owned by the same parent and rationalised to be made in the same factory.
They get traded around like football cards.
We have them :-) We also store every single revision of the product, but we don't display the changes yet.
Join us on http://slack.openfoodfacts.org to see how we can just do that.
If your ingredients data is getting stale, you could reward users with coupons for stale-data items, so some users will take pictures of the ingredients list (kind of a 'bounty' list). You could do this for new items too - e.g. a popup after the picture is taken saying you can get $0.50 off if you take a picture of the UPC and ingredients list. Do a visual diff on the ingredients photo to see if the they have changed, and if so, OCR it to the database.
One is easy, the other is hard.
There are APIs and libraries for OCR, so that might not be so bad (even on a mobile device). A low-end phone is faster than the first PCs I did OCR on anyhow, and about 20 years more research has gone into algorithms.
For example, ice-cream manufacturers make ice-cream with peanuts in it on the same line as everything else. However, because they clean it between runs it's supposedly fine, and wont list it... It's all good until I have a reaction and have no idea why.
If you have allergies it's a great reason to learn to cook your own food. As said, you should also always carry and EpiPen and other drugs.
Yes, but they may severely limit your life-choices, and it also defeats the purpose of ingredient labelling (if you can't rely on it).
At least in Brazil, every time the formula of a product, or the quantity in the package, is changed, companies have to disclose that on the packaging.
Here, the packaging must describe the contents and that description must be accurate, so changes must be reflected there. But nothing requires them to say "hey, we changed this" beyond changing the nutritional information, which most people don't pay attention to.
Legislation forcing companies to disclose that something has changed in a more noticable (less specific) way, would no doubt just result in those warnings always being there, making them just as useless (I mean, maybe you could say 'new formula as of <date>', but again, people are probably just going to ignore it with that much detail).
I think having the year+month of the last recipe change would work perfectly fine. If you care what the ingredients are, it's very easy to notice. Much better than 'new'. The goal is not to force anyone to care. The goal is to have information be convenient. Scouring the entirety of the nutritional info is not convenient. And adding the date is a minimal burden to the company.
If a reasonable person who's not paying attention doesn't notice it, it's not enough.