I hope I can logically explain my way of thinking here.
My Fruit20 says on the bottle, ‘All natural flavors!’
Let’s say it’s orange flavored. Though, of course, it could be lemon, raspberry…whatever. We’ll use orange.
The priting on the bottle goes on to tell me that there is NO juice in this product. Yet, the ingredients list “orange flavoring.”
PLEASE, someone explain to me how something that tastes like ORANGE can have no orange JUICE in it? Where does the orange flavoring come from if it’s not squeezed from juices. How can it have zero fruit content if it’s naturally orange?
This has been bothering me for a long time.
I’d also like to know why my fragrance-free hair spray has “fragrance” listed as one of the ingredients. But we can save that for later.
It doesn’t have zero FRUIT content, it has zero JUICE content. You can get orange flavoring from, say, orange ZEST, which is orange RIND rather than orange JUICE, and so you’re set!
I’m not saying this is actually the case but it’s a possibility, right?
Yeah, see, I thought something like that too. Like what if they take bits of orange and make them into a powder somehow and put THAT in the water and call it orange flavored.
The thing is…how “natural” is THAT? Isn’t there some law about how processed something can be and still be called natural?
Regarding the hair spray, I’d imagine that all of the stuff they put in it normally has some scent. So to make it fragrance-free, they have to put in a fragrance to make it smell like it has no fragrance.
“Natural” just means the process of making it started with some part of the actual object. “Artificial” means they started with a bunch of chemicals in jars.
“All natural flavors!” is just marketing. Natural orange flavor means “stuff that tastes like orange, from a ‘natural’ source”. Unless for the unlikely case of being explicitly told otherwise on the label, you have to assume there isn’t any fruit in there.
Natural strawberry aroma is made from chemically processed sawdust, natural raspberry flavor is from cedar oil extract. Wood is ‘natural’, after all. Natural peach aroma is made by a fungus. (I’m not sure about orange aroma, it really could base on orange peel oil, at least the non-artificial one.)
Sometimes you read “with REAL! juice”. That’s it, some juice added to have something to write on the label, but the aroma of the product still comes from added flavor. All the fruit in the world wouldn’t meet a fraction of the needs of the modern designer-food industry.
QUOTE]Natural strawberry aroma is made from chemically processed sawdust, natural raspberry flavor is from cedar oil extract. Wood is ‘natural’, after all. Natural peach aroma is made by a fungus. (I’m not sure about orange aroma, it really could base on orange peel oil, at least the non-artificial one.)
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You’re part right…a natural raspberry flavor could contain cedar oil extract (assuming it’s GRAS) but to claim a that a flavor is natural it must contain something that actually came from that source (assuming there is a standard of identity for that source)…so a nat raspberry flavor must contain raspberry juice, essence, whatever. Anything else in the flavor must also be from natural sources, but not necessiarly from a raspberry. Things that are fantasy flavors (ex tutti fruitti) are simply made of natural chemicals. Another caveat is that artificial flavor solvents can be used in natural flavors, since they are solvents and not flavoring material…and it goes on from there
Exactly!!..if anything natural flavors are more costly and less reproducible due to “natural” variations in the raw materials used to make them. Of course for an orange flavor to be considered natural it would have to contain some part of an orange, not necessiarily juice, oil is perfectly acceptable.
Flavors do not just come from juice concentrates and essential oils. Flavors are really a product of the speciality chemical industry, there is a huge palate of (mainly) organic chemicals that are approved for use in foods and pharmaceuticals. IIRC a natural flavor must contain at least 0.1% of something from that source.
There is another class of flavors called “natural type” flavors that are made of all natural ingredients but contain nothing from the source after which it is named. So I could take orange oil and legally name it natural strawberry type flavor.
I never meant to imply those fruit names would make it to the label.
The laws make a difference between labeling the flavor stuff itself, the ingredient list on the product, and the words on the rest of the label. Its manufacturer may label a flavoring “natural raspberry flavor”, even if it uses no berries, as long as it comes from above defined ‘natural’ sources.
You may only call a finished product “natural raspberry flavored” or say it contains “natural raspberry flavor” if the ‘primary recognizable flavor’ contains some raspberry derived stuff, though.
If all of the flavors of a fruit-flavored product were completely non-fruit-based, you would have to call it artificially flavored, even if all flavors are from ‘natural’ sources and you still may separately say so for them. Interestingly, “all natural flavors” here and “orange flavoring” there actually doesn’t say anything about the status of the product itself.
Here is said it’s a naturally flavored product. So at least some part of their flavoring mixture would be based on some part of the real fruits. Whoopee. :rolleyes:
