Carb content on food packaging

[Caroline Wilson]

I contacted Boots to ask if the total carbs could be displayed on their food products. This is their response, so watch this space...

Dear Ms Wilson

Thank you for contacting us regarding wanting a display of the overall Carbs displayed.

I have passed your comments onto our Packaging and our Food Time teams they can then review this during their meetings. I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you again for contacting us. If we can be of any further help please feel free to contact us on the number below. Please find below a questionnaire to help us offer the best possible customer care.

Kind regards

Loren Fisher

Boots Customer Care.

 

[Northerner]

Good one Caroline. I rejected several things yesterday for my 'anniversary treat' as they only showed the sugar value, not total carbs. Admittedly, they were probably the same thing in the stuff I was looking at! Hope they take notice 🙂

 

[Caroline]

I thought I'd contact some of the companies about their food labeling. SInce so many people have problems with Boots I'd start on them first. They want our custom....

 

[Lizzie]

Hi

Well done. I have tried in the past to write to various chains such as 'Eat' which is a sandwich chain, because they are minimalist and trendy and seem to think it is more important to write down which farm the chickens came from which laid the eggs in their sandwiches, or a life story of the farmers who tended them, than put any nutritional info at all on the packaging. The standard answer is 'it's on the website' but if you are out in a shop you aren't looking at the website, not everyone has a poncey phone that can look at the internet. Planning everything and looking at all the websites of any shop you might eat in the night before you go out is incredibly boring and takes the fun out of it, and sometimes is just impossible anyway, you don't always know where you might go or what cafes or shops there are.

 

[NiVZ]

Hello,

Just my two cents on food packaging. I hate any packet that doesn't show the total value of carbs for the entire product.

Pre-packed sandwiches are especially bad for this. They often tell you how much 100g gives you, but sometimes I can't find the weight of the sandwich anywhere on the box. What I end up doing is a complicated multiplication based on the info provided on the front (most of these tell you what %fat for each sandwich on the front), with the values per 100g on the back. But this is sometimes not easy and for anyone not good at maths it's just another barrier and could cause someone to take an oncorrect dose.

I think the food companies should be made to make it very clear on the packet that:

EATING ALL OF THIS PACKET GIVES YOU xxx CARBS

That would make things a lot clearer.

NiVZ

 

[Caroline]

Perhaps what we need to do is for ALL of us, each and everyone to contact all these companies and ask for the information we want to see on the packaging.