Tricks Food Brands Use to Rip Us Off

It’s safe to say that food brands aren’t disappearing into the ether anytime soon. Even if a giant nuclear spider was to destroy all of humanity tomorrow, the husks of our Coca-Cola cans and our empty bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos would remain tethered to this earth for a long time. But unfortunately, not every brand will honestly sell its products. Some items have sneaky words on their packaging that may fool us into buying products we’d be better off without. Some lower-quality goods are designed to copycat other brands, and still, there are those items that have oversized packaging. But maybe worst of all, there are products that straight-up lie to our faces. Hopefully, by the end of this article, we’ll all become more conscious consumers.

Some Brands Put Irrelevant Facts on Their Packaging

Most packaged food that you buy at a supermarket is covered in words. A lot of these terms are useful and can help us make informed purchasing decisions. Like, it’s a good thing that these items have to list their ingredients. However, the food brands that make these products may slap some extraneous and sleek info onto their boxes. Some cheese products advertise that it’s all natural and has no artificial colors and flavors, but the same thing can be said about most cheeses. If you were to buy this product instead of a cheaper cheese because of these claims, you’re potentially spending more than necessary. Let’s keep this in mind the next time that we’re reading a product’s claims.

Some Brands Fill Chips with Mostly Air

Most unopened packets of chips look incredibly full like they’re brimming with Friday-night snacks. But if we were to open such a bag, we’d probably find that it wasn’t filled with as many chips as we could eat and was instead ballooned with unbranded emptiness. These bags are filled up with nitrogen. It seems that packaging and the display of food have become an illusion.

Most Branded Flours and Sugars From Food Brands Hide a Major Fact

If you’re buying a food brand’s product at a premium price, then you’re probably expecting that it’s a higher-quality item. After all, if it costs more, then it has to be better. And at the very least, it can’t be essentially the same thing as a generic version. Right? Brand-made flours, sugars, and salts typically have the same taste and texture as their generic counterparts. If you’re buying branded flour, sugar, or salt, that’s practically the same as a generic version because you think that it’s superior, then you’re being fooled.

Bottled Water From Your Favorite Brand May Not Be That Special

The statistics company Statista revealed that in 2018, bottled water production made more than $18 billion in the U.S. alone. This figure is mind-boggling. One would probably hope that this liquid gold came from a glacier farm in the Swiss Alps instead of essentially coming straight from the tap. But sadly, such an ice acreage doesn’t exist — plus, a decent amount of bottled water is made using the tap stuff. Forty-five percent of all U.S. bottled water originates from tap water, and around a mere fifty-five percent of bottled water comes from springs.  Bottled water can cost $8.00 per gallon, and tap water can cost $0.004 per gallon. Therefore, if we buy food brands’ H20 containing the tap stuff, we’re being had. Moreover, we should ask ourselves if bottled spring water is honestly worth such a markup.