Today’s culprit is… Jello’s Chocolate Pudding! Oh wait, no, “pudding snacks”, whatever in the label-regulation-dodging fuck that means.

Posting here because this has quickly become a very common shrinkflation tactic where the manufacturer substitutes fructose/sucrose in their main product with the cheaper aspartame and stevia and calls it “healthy”. There is no sucrose-only version of this product anymore.

However, these shrinkflated products taste bitter, unsweetened and are completely unappetizing to me. So I end up having to look at labels very carefully (usually some thin text at the bottom of the label) to make sure they didn’t sneak in some artificial sweetener.

The strangest part is I haven’t seen or heard of anyone complaining about it, are we in the minority of people for who artificial sweeteners are bitter, like Cilantro that tastes like soap? Both me and my partner find it bitter and unappetizing in any product, but only I have the “cilantro gene”.

I did find these articles on the topic:

https://www.phillymag.com/be-well-philly/2013/08/22/study-fake-sweeteners-taste-disgusting-people/ (the source link is dead, here’s a wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20130826013630/http://www.futurity.org/top-stories/why-fake-sweeteners-can-taste-funky/)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120531102334.htm

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    271·
    8 months ago

    Just on the pudding snacks bit. Unfortunately this is not new and is very common.

    Words like pudding are highly regulated by the FDA. You can look up exactly what they mean by googling the FDA definition, they say exactly how much sugar, fat, etc needs to be in a serving.

    Cheese is the one I noticed. Unless it says “cheese” - it ain’t cheese. Chee-z, cheesy, cheese-flavor, chee-tos,its,ums whatever are all highly processed cheese-flavor that could have little or no cheese in them.

    You may already know that, but a shocking amount of Americans don’t

    • setVeryLoud(true);OPM
      151·
      8 months ago

      I’ve always felt these regulations was a bit toothless when companies could get away with “Chocolatey Chips” instead of “Chocolate Chips”, and the average consumer would be none the wiser to the word dance that’s going on here. But I am glad they exist at all.

      Re: American Cheese, Nile Red actually made some: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aGNAxN5Z-o

      • CanadianCorhen
        2·
        8 months ago

        Yea, chocolatey can mean chocolate, in every day talk

        “How did you get these chocolate cookies so chocolaty?”

        I think they should have to go all the way down to “chocolate flavored”

        “Granola bar with chocolate flavored coating”

    • rdyoung@lemmy.world
      91·
      8 months ago

      Don’t forget, cheese product, any time they add a word like product, it means that it’s not what you think it is.