Minimum Concentration in a drink

[AdamW]

I just polished off a bottle Lipton "Lemon Ice Tea". I happened to glance at the ingredients list and saw:

tea extract (0.14%), lemon juice (0.1%).

The remaining 99.76% was mainly water, sugar and citric acid.

Totally unreasonable, I thought that when buying "Lemon Ice Tea" I would be buying something mainly consisting of lemon, and tea. They can keep the ice. I thought that more reasonable ingredients would be something along the lines of:

"Tea (tea leaves+water, 90%), lemon juice (9%), random other gunk (1%)"

I got to thinking. What is the minimum concentration you can have of something before it legally becomes "lemon flavoured citric sugar water beverage"?

Now, Kaliber is listed on the manufacturer's website as "alcohol free" but if I recall the label on the bottle reveals it is 0.5% abv. So, even with alcohol you can call it "alcohol free" if there is less than 0.5% of it by volume.

So surely, by that same brush, the "Lemon Ice Tea" should be called "Lemon free, tea free, drink"...

Any thoughts?

 

[big-all]

interesting one adam

but in real life what percentage of a tea bag actualy gets taken up
in the tea i wouldn think it was more than one or two percent
of the "solids" from the leaves

happy sipping

big all

 

[kendor]

The word "Flavoured" allows a lot of leeway depending on what the ingredient is and how much is used of it is dependant on the taste tests conducted, our taste buds may react strongly to miniscule traces of one thing but the fact that most soft drinks contain a very high percentage of sugar tends to suggest that sugar is a poor stimulator of our taste buds and so to make us buy more of the product they play with our healths.

 

[big-all]

interesting theory kendor

i dont think its so much sugar is a poor stimulator

its because for years our diet has had excessive amount
of salt and sugar added to make prosced food more appealing
in actual fact sugar is very sweet and salt is extreemly strong
but our tast buds have been numbed against them
so you need to increase the levels as your body gets used
to the taste
thankfully manufacturers have realised high purified sugar
and salt levels are bad for us[whith a kick up the arise]
from the goverment and are now reducing them

big all

 

[securespark]

Adam

You are right, up to a point. You think your product should be labelled "Tea Lemon".

In the food industry, ingredients are listed in order of content, ie Largest first.

And the usual rule in descriptive labelling is that if one ingredient is present in greater proportion than another, the greater comes first, ie meat & potato pie has more meat than spud, and potato & meat pie has more spud than meat etc...

A product must be described with a name: in your case Lemon Tea, which is an accepted description for tea flavoured with lemon, in the same way that "Strawberry Cheescake" is accepted for a sweet dish consisting of a pastry or biscuit base with cream-cheese and strawberry fruit topping.

If ingredients are mentioned in the name of the product, the percentages must be listed too, as yours are.

In your case, there is more tea than lemon because it is labelled as "Lemon (ice) Tea" (ie Tea with lemon added).

Assuming "tea lemon" was an accepted description for a foodstuff, then it would have more lemon than tea in as it would be basically lemon with tea added.

Water does not always have to be declared unless it is added water. In your case the "tea" part of the description automatically suggests that it is made with water.


The mfrs are being honest - it is not made with tea (as you or I would make it) but with water with tea extract added to it, so they wouldn't list the ingredients as tea as you suggest.

As for 9% lemon juice, well, the addition of citric acid will do just as well...

Some ingredients are hidden altogether: they do not have to be listed if they form an ingredient in its own right. EG the ingredients list "Stock", but do not tell you what is in the stock so you do not know exactly what is there.

This is quite common. Most manufacturers do list the constituents of any ingredients that do themselves consist of several products, but this is not compulsory.

As for Kendor, if we take the example of lemon tea, then legally, "lemon-flavoured tea" means that the product need contain no real lemon at all.

"Peach-flavoured yogurt" contains no real peach, etc...

The perception of the ingredient in question is entirely through chemicals.

 

[pipme]

Hand me the jar of Apple juice !!

P

 

[breezer]

speaking of flavoured, if you look carefully at easter some eggs are chocolate flavoured, which means they have the flavour of chocolate, but contain no ( or minimal chocolate) which makes you wonder what are they made of?
___________________________________________________________

the other one that gets me is mouthwash, main ingrediant "aqua" now that sure sounds like water to me

 

[pipme]

Bit too late for most of us to start worrying ... at least we got this far

I do not think it is the Sparkies, Plasterers, brickies, bus drivers, etc, etc that have eased us into the situation .... Guess there are quite a few, and i wonder just who they may be ? Needing a little conscience over their lucrative (and maybe not so ££) deeds !!!

P

 

[AdamW]

I have wondered about the aqua one. Surely the ingredients should be in English, not latin... Not that many people would be confused about "aqua" but it just seems pointless.

 

[securespark]

Aqua used commonly for things lik mouthwash, shampoo, cosmetics etc..

Sounds more impressive than water. You don't want to pay 35 quid for a face cream to find out it is 45% water.....

Mind you, I looked at a packet of bacon a while ago in the s/market, ingredients were:

Water, pork, polyphosphates, salt.........

Yum. Think I'll have a water lettuce and tomato sandwich.....

 

[waran]

anyone into homeopathy?

The premise being that the more dilute a homeopathic medicine is the more effective it is. Very little objective evidence on its' efficacy but millions swear by it!

 

[big-all]

i think youll find "aqua"

is the universal word for water now on lables in lots of countries

big all

 

[AdamW]

Now you go to work to "bring home the water".

Due to these revelations in the ingredients of bacon, does this mean muslims and jews aren't allowed to drink water now?

 

[AdamW]

anyone into homeopathy?

The premise being that the more dilute a homeopathic medicine is the more effective it is. Very little objective evidence on its' efficacy but millions swear by it!

Did you see that documentary on "water memory", all about homeopathic medicine? They believe it is more effective if you "tap" the vile of solution on the workbench.

If I recall, didn't they calculate that the "best" homeopathic medicines were unlikely to contain a single molecule of the active ingredient?

 

[waran]

Sorry Adam, didn't see the program. But it's true that the dilutions involved would lead to not one single molecule of the substance being in solution (but surely at a quantum level you wouldn't know which solution had that one molecule, would you?- perhaps that's another topic).
From the published literature most would argue that homeopathy doesn't exist based on double blind randomised controlled trials which in modern medicine is the best sort of evidence available. However there does seem to be a wealth of anecdotal reports on it's effective use.
Personally I don't think homeopathy works at any level beyond that of a placebo effect. However I'll keep an open mind on the matter. and I do believe that if you could prove it's effects then a noble prize would probably be on the cards!