Flat coke 33% of the time seems hard to believe. Where do you live? Coke has hundreds of bottling partners worldwide and they only distribute the syrup to these bottling plants.
I'd rather not disclose, but for what it's worth the subset of bottlers would be limited to those supplying Walmart, since that's where I buy the bulk of it. It really is bad enough that I ought to complain and provide lot numbers for free coupons.
Other products (Diet Dr. Pepper) are unaffected; I don't know if they share bottlers.
Same. I'm in NJ, and have never had a flat Coke from an undamaged container (and if the can looks all smashed up, I've just poured those out).
OP should def complain to corporate, something in their process is FUBAR if 1/3rd of the product is damaged. Though being who I am, I'd assume that has more to do with the handling of the produce by/at Walmart.
It's not visible or concealed damage, it really looks like poor QA.
All cans (and it's always cans, not bottles) are visibly intact. Sometimes the can itself is "squishy" due to lack of gas. Other times they barely foam when poured. It's usually potable but wildly inconsistent in taste.
Most are fine, but it's gotten too expensive to keep overlooking duds.
When you say it I think I need to agree that cans have got flatter.
I've noticed this in a lot of fields. Like small things stop being good. Like opening bags of spaghetti is impossible on many brands without scissors or having pasta everywhere after it bursts. When pulling the string on the foil around a cookie "foil cylinder" the string is misaligned with the cutout, so it doesn't work. Etc.
I think the underlying issue is attrition. Workers have no time to get competent. Or the toxic management style of "not caring" is taking its toll and the senior engineers got fed up and quit instead of fighting management to make things good.
> but for what it's worth the subset of bottlers would be limited to those supplying Walmart
That would be ~all of them, I would think. The whole point of having loads of bottlers is to avoid having to haul the stuff very long distances; I think they'll normally just supply from whichever is closest.
Weird - I don't drink Diet Coke anymore, but I remember thinking it was flatter than it used to be when I would open a can. I wonder if they're trying to skimp on CO2 or something.
Good, hyperpalatable foods being less hyperpalatable might help reset some taste buds and help people tolerate somewhat more "real" flavors. Like the bitterness of veggies!
People will just lower their standards and normalize the lower quality. This stuff is engineered “food” after all. It just has to stimulate the right neurotransmitters. American chocolate case in point.
This trend got me to stop eating junk food for good. This also extends to 100% of fast food and takeout. Beyond the crap quality, the cost of these options has become insane.
The new ingredients are typically abysmal for your health by comparison. Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023. Seriously, go try right now. I am not a seed oil guy, but the statistical prevalence of these oils might have some impact on public health and the fact that no alternatives appear to exist (outside of boutique settings) does kill off some of my bullshit canaries.
Food companies can't screw with the raw ingredients too much. It's a challenge to find certain things like actual chicken broth and sometimes I wonder if the onions are getting weaker, but you can more or less maintain the same quality you'd expect if you cook your own food.
If you are time-sensitive, then cook more at a once to amortize your time investment. Your freezer isn't just for holding the crap that comes frozen at the grocery store. You can accumulate weeks worth of high-quality DIY rations with proper discipline. Think about how big a pot you could actually put on your stove. How many cubic feet is your oven? Do you have the ability to run a propane burner outside? You can make a month's worth of lunch in 3 hours. Think about the economics of that at scale. Sure, you would spend a solid week cooking, but then you would have several amazing meal options to choose from for an entire financial quarter.
Every now and then I'll sample a bit of trash like Oreos or Cheezits at someone else's house, but every time I decide I never want to buy these products again. If I really get a strong hankering for some cheezits, I'll bake my own. That's also how I keep myself in check on fitness - If I don't want to cook it, then I am not going to eat it.
Likewise. I've lost about 60 lbs over the past year and I have corporate greed, in part, to thank for it. Most of it costs more, delivers less quantity and uses worse ingredients.
Thanks for being greed-driven entities of shit, Corps!
My waistline and partner thank you!
Well, when someone singles out seed oils, they almost always are saying that butter is somehow better which is why I ask. And from there I ask them for the evidence so I can gauge their epistemic standards.
For example, your comments make no effort to distinguish saturated fat from unsaturated fat. Unsaturated fats are fine. Saturated fats have a mountain of evidence converging on their negative health impact.
Ruffles and Lays potato chips are just potatoes, vegetable oil, and salt. I think it's debatable whether butter or sunflower oil are healthier, but the environmental impact of butter is certainly worse.
I'd like to see the evidence for that. Given the evidence we have against saturated fat, I would expect better health outcomes for people fed potato chips fried in vegetable oil over butter. Every time we swap saturated fat with unsaturated fat, even in metabolic ward studies, we see better outcomes.
When I see someone saying that butter is somehow better, I like to see what evidence they've used to reach the inference despite all the evidence against that position.
Unfortunately the position usually just cashes out into "but I like butter".
I'm no food scientist, but it's probably better to cook perishable items in butter than it is to eat a bunch of foods made shelf-stable by a giant laundry list of ingredients that you would never eat otherwise.
This page is very well designed! I really like that it puts the focus on text arrangement, font sizes and the strength of border lines around the cells and whole tables. Looks very pleasing.
Now this! THIS is one of the coolest projects I've seen in a while! Why did instacart never build anything this useful? I'd give anything to be able to filter my grocery store's shelves with something like this.
> If you are time-sensitive, then cook more at a once to amortize your time investment. Your freezer isn't just for holding the crap that comes frozen at the grocery store. You can accumulate weeks worth of high-quality DIY rations with proper discipline. Think about how big a pot you could actually put on your stove. How many cubic feet is your oven? Do you have the ability to run a propane burner outside? You can make a month's worth of lunch in 3 hours. Think about the economics of that at scale. Sure, you would spend a solid week cooking, but then you would have several amazing meal options to choose from for an entire financial quarter.
Do you, or others, have any advice or references for this? I cook at home, and I generally enjoy it, but I'm not very good with the meal planning part and knowing what will save, for how long, and how to store it, so I'm mostly making meals a day or two at a time and at the grocery every week.
I may not be able to get away from that entirely, but I'd love to scale the daily food prep back and limit the weekly shopping to only the stuff I need fresh.
My favorite for this is bulk batching anything that could freeze well and owning a chest freezer - if thats an option. Chili, burritos, spaghetti, curry, etc. Anything that goes on rice is a prime target, just make 2-3 cups per person at the start of the week and fiend off of that. If you’re feeling froggy then fried rice at the mid-end of the week is also a super keen way of getting rid of fridge waste.
Start simple. Things that are trivial to store for long term and easy to reheat would be soup, chili, taco prep, pasta.
Meal prep doesn't necessarily mean 100% completed ahead of time either. For me, I have a perpetual frozen store of taco meat (1 frozen portion per meal), but I still have to toast up the shells fresh each time and occasionally cycle in a new bowl of beans, which lasts 2-3 days per in the fridge. Frozen portions you can bet on for ~90 days minimum in a typical consumer side-by-side before freezer burn and defrost cycle starts to take hold. If you have a proper deep freeze arrangement, many things will last indefinitely.
Now I'm fantasizing about taco starter that works just like sourdough starter. Take out a couple scoops for dinner, add back a few oz of your meat choice and a shake of seasoning, repeat.
I thought every industry was rapidly migrating to Palm oil specifically because it is very cheap and saturated, I am surprised they still use the much more expensive and healthy seed oils.
> Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023.
... Wait, when were commercial chips _not_ fried in one of these (or possibly rapeseed or peanut oil)? Also, what's wrong with sunflower oil?
> the fact that no alternatives appear to exist
What were you expecting? Olive oil and lard would both have smoke points too low to be practical, I would think. Like, what do you think they should be using?
I've definitely seen chips at Whole Food fried in animal fats, but they were substantially more expensive which I think a) makes sense and b) is a good thing given the additional environmental cost of raising and consuming animals.
Commercially produced bagged potato chips more or less never were, I don't think? I don't think you'd get a very good product if you fried them in lard and then put them in a bag for a year.
You can have my butter when you pry it from my cold, dead, slightly greasy hands! That would actually be pretty easy, but then your fellow vegans would ask why you have butter.
> This trend got me to stop eating junk food for good. This also extends to 100% of fast food and takeout. Beyond the crap quality, the cost of these options has become insane.
Low quality and high price is the exact "perfect storm" that's needed to turn back the tide on fast food and the health problems that come with it.
> It's a challenge to find certain things like actual chicken broth
It's also hard to find chicken and pigs that haven't been fed soybean, safflower, or sunflower oils. They eat it, they store it in their fat, then you eat it.
After COVID my food allergies have been insane. I can't prove they're related and my doctor has no idea but pretty much overnight in early 2021 I became extremely sensitive to a bunch of ingredients including corn. Subsequently I had to cut out 99% of junk food and snacks sold in stores.
The upshot, I feel great and eliminating corn syrup and whatever else those foods and drinks had has reduced my cravings for sweets by something like 99.5%.
> The new ingredients are typically abysmal for your health by comparison. Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023. Seriously, go try right now. I am not a seed oil guy, but the statistical prevalence of these oils might have some impact on public health and the fact that no alternatives appear to exist (outside of boutique settings) does kill off some of my bullshit canaries.
There is absolutely nothing unhealthy about seed oils.
I loved Nutella for 20 years but stopped when I realized it's just a jar of palm oil full of cocoa powder, sugar, and a drop of hazelnut flavor. Might as well eat a jar of crisco.
It also makes it's price absolute bullshit, since palm oil isn't exactly expensive.
Well - as an Easter European here - the Nutella made for Eastern Europe always tasted like shit compared to the one produced for Germany or Italy. I think the German one was the best. Also Nutella is getting shittier globally.
Any making home made gianduia paste is quite easy - you need a good coverture chocolate, butter, hazelnut nut butter and a dash of vanilla. And it tasted better than everything that Nutella has.
I’m surprised that the mainstream brands aren’t bringing back “classic” flavors and changing double for the premium market like coke does with mexi/classic coke.
I’d buy Oreo classics for example if they are made with sugar and less gross filling.
In the context of this conversation they're both "junk food" so it makes sense to group them. But soda and cookies are quite different things and it makes some sense to me that people could have different consumption patterns and tolerance for change between them.
I don't want to give them toooo much credit here but also I have to assume whatever industrial food giant owns all these brands has spent a lot of money on the question of how far they can cut costs on each individual thing without completely destroying the brand.
Someone should make a website to track changes. See if we can create some sort of historical record. I’d love to be able to look up if my favorite brand is now crap.
This may be a contributor to the popularity of stores like Erewhon where $20 smoothies may be more representative of actual cost of ingredients compared to mass produced items.
It's not just the quality of the ingredients. Snack manufacturers in the UK are under pressure from the government to make their snacks more healthy so they are, for example, reducing salt. Twiglets and Krackawheat, which were my favourite snack and cracker, are both trash now. It's been over a year and I'm still ticked off about it.
Oreos got much worse it’s not just me. Same with chips ahoy. The prices skyrocketed too. I bought store brand until those rose to the price of name brand and then just stopped buying them. I miss them, but not at that price. The savior currently is dollar tree thin mints for $1.25, those are a steal.
This might explain my recent experience too. I've been on a health journey and stopped eating most junk some time back. Recently, I decided to go ahead and splurge and get a chocolate bar that I always used to love. It tasted like hot garbage. Whether that's because my taste buds have changed or the product did is probably debatable, but I'm thrilled it's no longer a temptation to buy it!
They ruined Cadbury Eggs years ago for me, and now "fun size" snickers too!
Check the ingredients in that chocolate, and it will probably have something called "PGPR" in the list. PGPR is a flavorless, odorless, waxy solid with a similar (but not identical) melting profile to cocoa butter. Now cocoa butter is expensive and getting more expensive, and companies like Reese's, Cadbury's and a lot of others just started cutting much of the cocoa butter out and added in PGPR as filler.
That's just one way these products became flavorless, waxy, and generally unpleasant. Of course to combat this more sugar is often added, just to keep people coming back. More broadly though highly processed food is just too salty, too sweet, and often has a background of off-flavors... but it takes time away from them to start noticing it.
PGPR is polyglycerol polyricinoleate -- an emulsifier made from glycerol and fatty acids. It's used to modify the flowability of molten chocolate and is typically less than 1/2 percent of the chocolate mix. If a company is using more than that the chocolate probably isn't going to harden... It's one of the hundreds of "mostly harmless" additives you see everywhere these days not a filler. Whether all these additives are really ok once you put them in every single thing has yet to be seen.
That makes a lot of sense. I recall thinking that it just tasted like slightly chocolate flavored sugar and was waxy - no flavor at all, just sweet and waxy. I guess you get what you pay for - my other splurge lately was a tiny chocolate from a specialty shop that was $1 for a single small piece, which I balked at, but it was DELICIOUS.
I feel like it's kind of case by case with the chocolate bars. Overall, quality has declined, but some more than others. I think Snickers are still ok, but for example KitKat is absolute trash, along with Milk Duds, Whoppers, Baby Ruth ...
There must be separate quality lines because the stuff they put in the Halloween variety bags always tastes bad but getting a standard KitKat is better. I've definitely noticed the variety packs also pick up each others flavors.
Do you want to hear the fun part - all of those taste amazing in East and South East Asia for some reason. They have the best American junk food there for some reason.
Perhaps the degree to which people's tastebuds are trained on real foods, determines how much skimping on ingredients (in pre-packaged and/or junkfoods) is tolerated there?
I'd wager taste buds. When I moved to the USA from Europe a decade ago I couldn't stand how horrible Hershey's chocolate is. After a decade of nibbling it I now find it totally palatable.
Maybe one day I'll get used to Coke with HFCS instead of cane sugar.
94 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadOther products (Diet Dr. Pepper) are unaffected; I don't know if they share bottlers.
OP should def complain to corporate, something in their process is FUBAR if 1/3rd of the product is damaged. Though being who I am, I'd assume that has more to do with the handling of the produce by/at Walmart.
All cans (and it's always cans, not bottles) are visibly intact. Sometimes the can itself is "squishy" due to lack of gas. Other times they barely foam when poured. It's usually potable but wildly inconsistent in taste.
Most are fine, but it's gotten too expensive to keep overlooking duds.
I've noticed this in a lot of fields. Like small things stop being good. Like opening bags of spaghetti is impossible on many brands without scissors or having pasta everywhere after it bursts. When pulling the string on the foil around a cookie "foil cylinder" the string is misaligned with the cutout, so it doesn't work. Etc.
I think the underlying issue is attrition. Workers have no time to get competent. Or the toxic management style of "not caring" is taking its toll and the senior engineers got fed up and quit instead of fighting management to make things good.
That would be ~all of them, I would think. The whole point of having loads of bottlers is to avoid having to haul the stuff very long distances; I think they'll normally just supply from whichever is closest.
The new ingredients are typically abysmal for your health by comparison. Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023. Seriously, go try right now. I am not a seed oil guy, but the statistical prevalence of these oils might have some impact on public health and the fact that no alternatives appear to exist (outside of boutique settings) does kill off some of my bullshit canaries.
Food companies can't screw with the raw ingredients too much. It's a challenge to find certain things like actual chicken broth and sometimes I wonder if the onions are getting weaker, but you can more or less maintain the same quality you'd expect if you cook your own food.
If you are time-sensitive, then cook more at a once to amortize your time investment. Your freezer isn't just for holding the crap that comes frozen at the grocery store. You can accumulate weeks worth of high-quality DIY rations with proper discipline. Think about how big a pot you could actually put on your stove. How many cubic feet is your oven? Do you have the ability to run a propane burner outside? You can make a month's worth of lunch in 3 hours. Think about the economics of that at scale. Sure, you would spend a solid week cooking, but then you would have several amazing meal options to choose from for an entire financial quarter.
Every now and then I'll sample a bit of trash like Oreos or Cheezits at someone else's house, but every time I decide I never want to buy these products again. If I really get a strong hankering for some cheezits, I'll bake my own. That's also how I keep myself in check on fitness - If I don't want to cook it, then I am not going to eat it.
Thanks for being greed-driven entities of shit, Corps! My waistline and partner thank you!
For example, your comments make no effort to distinguish saturated fat from unsaturated fat. Unsaturated fats are fine. Saturated fats have a mountain of evidence converging on their negative health impact.
When I see someone saying that butter is somehow better, I like to see what evidence they've used to reach the inference despite all the evidence against that position.
Unfortunately the position usually just cashes out into "but I like butter".
This is a project that isn't quite ready for prime time, but it is turning up some options: https://labelferret.com/?search=chip+-%22sunflower%22+%2Bpot...
But your point still stands - the impossibility of finding food with ingredients I wanted to eat led to me creating Label Ferret.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/body-armor-blocked-ports-...
Do you, or others, have any advice or references for this? I cook at home, and I generally enjoy it, but I'm not very good with the meal planning part and knowing what will save, for how long, and how to store it, so I'm mostly making meals a day or two at a time and at the grocery every week.
I may not be able to get away from that entirely, but I'd love to scale the daily food prep back and limit the weekly shopping to only the stuff I need fresh.
Meal prep doesn't necessarily mean 100% completed ahead of time either. For me, I have a perpetual frozen store of taco meat (1 frozen portion per meal), but I still have to toast up the shells fresh each time and occasionally cycle in a new bowl of beans, which lasts 2-3 days per in the fridge. Frozen portions you can bet on for ~90 days minimum in a typical consumer side-by-side before freezer burn and defrost cycle starts to take hold. If you have a proper deep freeze arrangement, many things will last indefinitely.
Now I'm fantasizing about taco starter that works just like sourdough starter. Take out a couple scoops for dinner, add back a few oz of your meat choice and a shake of seasoning, repeat.
... Wait, when were commercial chips _not_ fried in one of these (or possibly rapeseed or peanut oil)? Also, what's wrong with sunflower oil?
> the fact that no alternatives appear to exist
What were you expecting? Olive oil and lard would both have smoke points too low to be practical, I would think. Like, what do you think they should be using?
Potato chips and french fries predate industrial seed oils.
Low quality and high price is the exact "perfect storm" that's needed to turn back the tide on fast food and the health problems that come with it.
> It's a challenge to find certain things like actual chicken broth
It's also hard to find chicken and pigs that haven't been fed soybean, safflower, or sunflower oils. They eat it, they store it in their fat, then you eat it.
Not that it is any better. Reminds me how we have pork fed with rapeseed here... As something positive, I wonder is that really better or not...
The upshot, I feel great and eliminating corn syrup and whatever else those foods and drinks had has reduced my cravings for sweets by something like 99.5%.
There is absolutely nothing unhealthy about seed oils.
Hazelnut spread was originally invented in response to a shortage of cocoa.
Interesting.
My personal pet peeve is carrageenan in everything. It makes ice cream and cream cheese have an unnaturally smooth texture that's quite off-putting.
It also makes it's price absolute bullshit, since palm oil isn't exactly expensive.
I'd rather eat a jar of palm oil to be honest
People frequently lose their "sweet tooth" as they get older. It's a normal thing for snacks you had as a kid to taste too sweet for you in adulthood.
Any making home made gianduia paste is quite easy - you need a good coverture chocolate, butter, hazelnut nut butter and a dash of vanilla. And it tasted better than everything that Nutella has.
We mostly eat home-cooked meals, but have kids and they want junk from time to time.
And the snacks at Trader Joe's, Sprouts and Costco taste amazing.
Junk is junk, but you can find chips that are less salty, and chocolates that are not overly sweet.
I don't want to give them toooo much credit here but also I have to assume whatever industrial food giant owns all these brands has spent a lot of money on the question of how far they can cut costs on each individual thing without completely destroying the brand.
Not to mention all the processing, packaging, retail & marketing costs.
Buy ingredients rather than ready-to-eat prepackaged foods, and you cut out the bulk of those non-essential costs.
Definitely could be my own anecdotal issues though
Why not you?
Were they more salty before that?
I suspect Fig Newtons are on this list. Our grocery chain puts out generic versions that taste much better!
They ruined Cadbury Eggs years ago for me, and now "fun size" snickers too!
That's just one way these products became flavorless, waxy, and generally unpleasant. Of course to combat this more sugar is often added, just to keep people coming back. More broadly though highly processed food is just too salty, too sweet, and often has a background of off-flavors... but it takes time away from them to start noticing it.
Source: eating my kids' leftover Halloween candy
Perhaps the degree to which people's tastebuds are trained on real foods, determines how much skimping on ingredients (in pre-packaged and/or junkfoods) is tolerated there?
Would be nice to see some research on that.
Maybe one day I'll get used to Coke with HFCS instead of cane sugar.