The OP had apparently made the assumption that “store-made” automatically implied that no preservatives or other factory cookery ingredients would be used. IOW, everything was as he’d make it at home from only simple basic staples simply prepared. As such, he preferred to buy, say, potato salad from the deli counter, assuming it was freshly cooked potatos, spices, and scratch-made mayo, rather than buy a factory-made tub of potato salad made with preservatives, xanthan gum, EDTA, etc.
He began to suspect, and this thread confirms, that most apparently store-made foods are actually just store-assembled from factory-made kits containing all those same factory ingredients he had hoped to avoid.
Which leads him to the sensible question of why a store would sell the same factory-made glop in two formats: factory tub and deli bulk display. Which led to my not entirely tongue-in-cheek answer “about $2.50/lb.”
I think the real message for all of us is to always assume until proven otherwise that anything you didn’t create from scratch yourself is made in a factory using factory-type ingredients. This applies to restaurants, delis, grocery hot & cold counters, etc. “Store made”, “house made”, “home style”, and all the rest are marketing puffery words devoid of actual meaning but carefully chosen and fully intended to mislead.
Bottom line: The absence of an ingredient list merely proves that ingredient lists aren’t legally required for this category of food sales, not that the food has no questionable ingredients.
There is a long list of meaningless phrases in food labelling. “Fresh!” (often with the exclamation mark) is top of my list, with “Home Made” a close second. No doubt we can all add more - Improved, health and low sugar are some others. Real fruit, whole grains and natural also.
Thing is, a home made potato salad is probably made with jarred mayo, that would have all sorts of “not home made” stuff in it.
There’s an entire continuum of production possibilities, from “dumped out of a SYSCO pail” to “made by hand with farm fresh ingredients”.
If a store says it’s “store made” I’m expecting at a minimum that the final product did not arrive at the store in a single box, that store personnel had to draw ingredients from multiple sources, and combine them in accordance with a specified recipe. I wouldn’t demand hand-julienned carrots in the slaw, but combining 3 prepared ingredients into a single bowl doesn’t meet the criteria.
For example, side by side are precooked heat & eat breaded chicken tenders.
The one with the words “Store Made” on the label lists: Chicken breast meat, bread crumbs, onion powder, salt.
The one that does not say “Store Made” lists something like: Chicken breast meat, bread crumbs, and a long list of things like Sodium benzoate, sodium erythorbate, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, BHA, BHT. The list is actually so long that they stick on two labels because it won’t fit on a single label.
Note that these are ink jet printed labels, very crudely done in an ugly blocky font, apparently to emphasize the non-commercial aspect of the stuff.
There are a few different items available each day on some rotating schedule. Things like the meatloaf and fried eggplant contain only ingredients you probably have in your own kitchen IF they have “Store Made” on the label, but right next to them you may see fried zucchini or breaded pork cutlets with the double label containing the long list of chemical additives.
There isn’t a chance in hell you could post pics of the labels, could you? (If you snap pics on your smartphone & use TapATalk on it, the app makes it easy.) Very often, the shorter list includes a word (such as mayonnaise) that itself *should *have a sub-list of ingredients, but I don’t know the details of when that sub-list is required.
So in your Store-Made Chicken Tenders example, there’s often something like “seasoning” (in the place of where you wrote “salt”) that would include a lot of the sodium something-or-others that show up on the longer Not-Store-Made ingredient list.
I’m sorry if I sounded antagonistic earlier, Turble, since I’m in fact talking about a related topic over here (homemade vs. store-bought, specifically how to make something instead of buying the pre-made version) and getting a surprising amount of “just buy the pre-made!” responses.
There ain’t no friggin’ way a grocery store is going to take the time to make scratch-made mayo because they don’t have the time and it’s not cost-effective. Very few people do it at home so why would one expect a grocery store to do it. And the potatoes they do use were probably leftover baked ones from the previous day.
@purplehorseshoe I’ll see what I can do about some pics next time I’m in the store. Of course, I’ll have to remember to take the phone, too … I don’t carry it very often. Maybe I’ll just buy one of the things I wouldn’t normally buy just so I can put it on the scanner at home. In any case, it will be a while.
The store made chicken tenders did list just onion powder and salt. I think the commercial version did use the word “seasoning” in its long list of polysyllabic ingredients.
I see you are taking some heat in that other thread over your bias. Label-readers unite!
