Welch’s Fruit snacks is basically just candy according to this new lawsuit.
One of the most frustrating things about grocery shopping is that nearly everything is marketed as delicious and healthy. You have “healthy” alternatives to candy, cookies, and choose but, it turns out that even those snacks that promise to fortify the body with “vitamins and nutrients” may be nothing more than candy in disguise. That’s right. Even the stuff that’s “made with real fruit” and “contains no preservatives.”
Two women have filed a class action lawsuit against Welch’s fruit snacks for their misleading marketing practices, which suggest Welch’s fruit snacks are healthy and good for you when they’re really “just as bad as a pack of Gummy Bears,” Slate reports. And it’s not just Welch’s: Annie’s Homegrown Organic Bunny Snacks, which are all pretty popular for Whole Food shoppers.
From Slate:
Let’s start with the sugar. A single serving of the Apple Orchard Medley flavor of Welch’s Fruit Snacks contains 11 grams—nearly three teaspoons’ worth—which means that 43 percent of every bite your kid takes is pure sugar. The Bernie’s Farm flavor of Annie’s Fruit Snacks is worse, composed of 48 percent sugar. By comparison, Haribo Gold-Bears, otherwise known as gummi bears, contain 46 percent sugar, so they’re pretty similar. Yet Gold-Bears also provide 2 grams of protein per serving, and Welch’s and Annie’s provide only a negligible amount. (Some research suggests that protein can boost satiety.)
If all these snacks are equally unhealthy, then why are their ingredient lists so different? Well, apparently they are not so different after all. Apparently Welch’s just disguises their ingredients.
Annie’s Fruit Snacks, on the other hand, list “organic tapioca syrup” as the first ingredient, which sounds healthy but is basically just sugar made from the cassava plant. The next two ingredients are organic cane sugar and organic tapioca syrup solids—more sugar. (But aren’t we relieved it was organically grown?) Looking at Welch’s: Up until recently, most flavors listed “fruit juices from concentrate” as the first ingredient, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers yet another synonym for added sugar. This summer, though, Welch’s changed the formulation of many flavors and now uses “fruit puree” as a first ingredient. Still, fruit purees are often very high in sugar. And, anyway, the next two ingredients on the list are corn syrup and sugar.
But, what about those vitamins? The two women who filed the lawsuit against Welch’s have covered that as well. According to the complaint, the company is being accused of illegally trying to pass their food off as “good for you” by fortifying it with vitamins and minerals to fool consumers into a false sense of comfort. In addition, according to Slate, vitamin C is commonly used as a preservative, so any claims that Welch’s and its competitors snacks are “preservative free” may just be a lie.
And there’s one major thing you should know before you pick up a bag of Welch’s fruit snacks. You are getting over charged.
For what they are, they’re crazy expensive. At my local grocery store, I can buy 14 ounces of Haribo Gold-Bears for $2.99. By comparison, nine ounces of Welch’s Fruit Snacks cost $2.89, and a mere four ounces of Annie’s Fruit Snacks cost $3.99. That makes Annie’s snacks almost five times more expensive than the candy they so closely resemble.
It’s just easier to pretend the food we are eating is healthy than to pay attention to what we are eating.
