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> What he saw was Country Crock Plant Butter Made with Olive Oil, a product with a green lid and a label showing a leafy olive branch floating above a buttered

> What he saw was Country Crock Plant Butter Made with Olive Oil, a product with a green lid and a label showing a leafy olive branch floating above a buttered slice of toast, with the words “New!” and “Dairy Free” in delighted-looking cursive. “Most margarines, they don’t put pictures of the ingredients,” Clemmons went on. > Reading, he made a startling discovery: the spread wasn’t made of olive oil, or even mostly made of olive oil. The primary ingredient was a processed blend of palm and canola oils. “I’d been drawn in because of the picture,” Clemmons told me. “And they knew that. I’m sure they knew that. Why wouldn’t people be attracted to things that are natural?” But it did contain olive oil -- it just wasn't the sole oil source. I don't think that's fraud, and, again, anybody can read the label and make up their own mind. A lawsuit over this is a joke. Also, implying that canola oil and palm oil aren't natural is pretty funny.

p1necone 3y ago
If I write an application in 20,000 lines of PHP, and there's 200 lines of JavaScript in some service is it sensible to say "written in JavaScript" on the product page without mentioning PHP at all? If I host the backend for that application on a bunch of Windows servers, but there's one server running that JavaScript service that's hosted on FreeBSD, and I advertise the product as "hosted on FreeBSD", is that sensible? You seem to be clutching at straws to prove your point so I'm not sure that it's even helpful to engage with you, but "X is made with Y" when X is something that could be made entirely with Y implies that X is made entirely/almost entirely with Y. Not "we put a tiny bit of Y in so that we can say it's made with Y on the label" - which is exactly what happened here. It's intentionally misleading.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  You neglect to consider the fact that all food products have nutrition labels, which are written according to certain standards and legal conventions. Could be that this company added some olive oil to their "plant spread" and wanted to visually distinguish this type from their alternative olive-free version. In any case, all nutrition facts are on the label -- the label clearly shows that the product is made of an oil blend -- and, as such, the picture of an olive on the packaging can hardly be "intentionally misleading" for more than about five seconds.
  - OnlineGladiator 3y ago
    You realize most people don't read the ingredients or are even aware of laws about protected terms such as organic? If you genuinely don't understand how that's misleading marketing, then you have no idea what most people are like. Could the average consumer be more educated? Sure. Could companies be less shitty about marketing their products in a misleading way? Yep. Let me give you my favorite example of a legally acceptable (and actually used) marketing gimmick: a good source of calcium with milk! I've seen this on products with literally 0% calcium, because everything is a good course of calcium with milk. This comment is a good source of calcium with milk. As to your example the issue isn't that it contains olive oil, but that it's not the primary oil used in the product when the labeling clearly implies that. It's a shitty marketing practice that misleads uninformed consumers into buying their product. Quit victim blaming and maybe we should just have marketing that isn't purposefully deceitful?
  - ncallaway 3y ago
    If you lie in big letters in a TV ad, and tell the truth in the fine print somewhere, we have a name for that: false advertising. If the front tells a lie in 45 point font, and the only place the truth is discovered is in 9pt font on the back, it’s a fraud. Sorry, that’s just how it works. You don’t have to list every ingredient on the front, but you can’t lie (or deliberately mislead) on the front, and get away with it because you told the truth on the back.

p1necone 3y ago

If I write an application in 20,000 lines of PHP, and there's 200 lines of JavaScript in some service is it sensible to say "written in JavaScript" on the product page without mentioning PHP at all? If I host the backend for that application on a bunch of Windows servers, but there's one server running that JavaScript service that's hosted on FreeBSD, and I advertise the product as "hosted on FreeBSD", is that sensible? You seem to be clutching at straws to prove your point so I'm not sure that it's even helpful to engage with you, but "X is made with Y" when X is something that could be made entirely with Y implies that X is made entirely/almost entirely with Y. Not "we put a tiny bit of Y in so that we can say it's made with Y on the label" - which is exactly what happened here. It's intentionally misleading.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
You neglect to consider the fact that all food products have nutrition labels, which are written according to certain standards and legal conventions. Could be that this company added some olive oil to their "plant spread" and wanted to visually distinguish this type from their alternative olive-free version. In any case, all nutrition facts are on the label -- the label clearly shows that the product is made of an oil blend -- and, as such, the picture of an olive on the packaging can hardly be "intentionally misleading" for more than about five seconds.
- OnlineGladiator 3y ago
  You realize most people don't read the ingredients or are even aware of laws about protected terms such as organic? If you genuinely don't understand how that's misleading marketing, then you have no idea what most people are like. Could the average consumer be more educated? Sure. Could companies be less shitty about marketing their products in a misleading way? Yep. Let me give you my favorite example of a legally acceptable (and actually used) marketing gimmick: a good source of calcium with milk! I've seen this on products with literally 0% calcium, because everything is a good course of calcium with milk. This comment is a good source of calcium with milk. As to your example the issue isn't that it contains olive oil, but that it's not the primary oil used in the product when the labeling clearly implies that. It's a shitty marketing practice that misleads uninformed consumers into buying their product. Quit victim blaming and maybe we should just have marketing that isn't purposefully deceitful?
- ncallaway 3y ago
  If you lie in big letters in a TV ad, and tell the truth in the fine print somewhere, we have a name for that: false advertising. If the front tells a lie in 45 point font, and the only place the truth is discovered is in 9pt font on the back, it’s a fraud. Sorry, that’s just how it works. You don’t have to list every ingredient on the front, but you can’t lie (or deliberately mislead) on the front, and get away with it because you told the truth on the back.