Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Not my field, but edible gums (guar gum, or xanthan gum for example) is "plastic" (adj.). Gums are used more and more, AFAICT as a consumer; presumably to allow products to be bulked out with air.

Basically take anything homogeneous, add gum, add air, create a foam. Basically like an Aero bar but with way smaller bubbles.

You just cut a quarter (I'm guessing on this figure) off your ice-cream ingredients by weight and you can now advertise "scoops from the freezer"!

It's genius but just a more complex version of putting all the pizza toppings in the little window, or having the coleslaw tub be much wider at the top, or putting everything in a wide plastic skirt so the box is 20% bigger than it needs to be, ... packaged food sellers are scumbags.

View on HN

This 'bulking up with air' is most evident if you go to the yogurt or cream cheese section and look for the Yoplait Whips or Philadelphia Whipped containers. It's the same product, just as a foam, and seems to be marketed as a healthier alternative where users choose a satisfactory portion by volume, not by calories or weight.

And while I think the whipped foods are stupid, I don't think that packaged food sellers are necessarily scumbags. They're merely people responding to incentives, just like everyone else. The food market has razor-thin margins and consumers are ill-informed. Neither consumers (who are hard to inform) nor regulators (who are captive to the multinational conglomerates) have been able to push back more strongly than the profit incentive, so the so dark patterns like those you describe are inevitable.

Whipped cream cheese is much easier to spread, in my experience. I know I could whip it myself, but why not just buy it that way?

Yup, also generally same cost by weight.

My kids eat a lot of creamcheese sandwiches. Block cream cheese just destroys sliced bread.

For me it's because I don't add xanthan gum, and I get a bulk discount on air.

Essentially all cream cheese, whipped or otherwise, contains gums anyway. "Real" cream cheese is kinda grainy whenever I've seen it.

It's not entirely true that regulators haven't plushed back: in the USA, there's a minimum amount of cream required before the vendor can call the product "ice cream".

The products in that category that have been puffed up with air (and don't meet this minimum) get sold as "dairy desserts".

(I don't work on the food industry, so I won't be shocked if I got details wrong.)

Which is exactly why McDonalds menus list "cones" and "sundaes". Not "ice cream cones". It's a frozen dairy dessert that is not legally ice cream. To be fair, McDonald's version is superior to any other fast food frozen dairy desserts that I've had.

Plenty of dieters do this themselves with protein fluff/"ice cream" (protein shakes with ice and xanthum gum). Overweight people almost by definition eat by volume not by calories (ie they eat more than their body needs for caloric maintenance).

So these whipped products seem pretty useful.

The bulking aspect doesn't bother me so much, what does bother me is that it's not as good and the only major ice cream brands left that aren't like this are Haagen-Dazs and Talenti.

I saw these yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR3Z028prSU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8t7u5mupS4

I don't think I'd want to eat that

What the hell

There is no way i would eat something linke that.

> "having the coleslaw tub be much wider at the top, or putting everything in a wide plastic skirt so the box is 20% bigger than it needs to be"

These days the trend seems to be to reduce the packaging, at least here in the UK. "Same size - less packaging!". So it seems like reduced packaging and distribution costs, and perhaps fitting more onto store shelves, outweighs any extra sales from customers who are fooled into thinking the product is bigger than it really is?

I think there are two things, one is a preference with some consumers towards less packaging (given two products about the same cost and one looks like less packaging I'll tend to pick that) and the other is there's been a lot of talk about taxing single use plastics so I've wondered if they've been trying to alter the supply chains before that point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com