Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelbarton | Hacker News Reader

I thought this noteworthy because butter is made from milk as the sole ingredient

Which, I would expect, ought to be well known by anyone shopping with lactose issues. It’s like shipping peanut brittle without a label saying that it contains peanuts. How many people would really be harmed without the recall?

I’m in favor of safety over profit. I’m just bummed at the unnecessary waste.

a lot of the alternative product packaging looks very similar to traditional dairy butter packaging

That sounds like an issue for the alternative people to solve.

It actually lists milk as an ingredient. So even if you are have doubts if its milkless butter, the ingredient list can clarify it.

If you see that on a product, you'd expect that the thing was made with milk, but does not contain any as far as you need to worry about allergens, and that it's tested to be safe.

It's a valid case in the truth table where somebody with a milk allergy should be safe to eat it

Does any such food product actually exist? Not even just for milk, but for any of the FDA's nine major allergens?

You will find that even butter often does not have milk in the ingredients list. E.g. Kerrygold: "pasteurized cream, salt"

In this case, the Kirkland's listed "sweet cream" and not milk.

That's not really accurate, most butter has salt, water, and sometimes a few other ingredients like lactic cultures, but milk is definitely always an ingredient.

Not all recalls involve disposing of a product. Apparently in this case it does. I'd have thought they could just send out some correction stickers to slap on there, but I suppose food labeling laws could be too rigid to allow for this, or else concerns about stickers being misapplied.

It is occasionally difficult to tell from the label whether you are buying margarine or butter. And some margarine contains milk and is therefore not OK for lactose intolerant folks.

But still, I agree this sounds crazy.

But this wasn't margarine. It was butter. The package is labeled Kirkland Signature Butter.

Where precisely did I go wrong here? We know it's butter, but a consumer might not, therefore a "contains whatever" label is not totally unjustified. Once you accept that as a rule, you have to enforce it. You don't just enforce it where it's ambiguous, you enforce it on all brands.

I could believe that "Signature Butter" could be a substance that wasn't butter. It would be dumb, but I wouldn't give you odds it didn't happen if someone claimed it did.

So putting milk in the ingredient list at least confirms that yes, this is butter, not "butter."

Don't worry, they will stick a label on it and it will go back to the shops. It's a good lesson for the supplier making the mistake. And besides, one might think it ís a harmless milk substitute..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com