Why go to all that trouble putting an idea for how to serve your product on the side of the box?I have enough imagination to be able to cook it and then put it on a plate and garnish it without a picture from you telling me how to do so.So why bother?
Because if they put a picture on the side of the box with garnish and gravy and candles without labeling it a “serving suggestion” they open themselves up to accusations of false advertising. Imagine the howls of outrage from consumers who buy the product and open the box only to find there is no garnish, no gravy, no candles!
I was told once that it’s a federal regulation that a company showing anything on the box that’s not included has to label it a serving suggestion so as to avoid misleading consumers but I have no idea if that’s true.
Personally I like getting recipes on the sides of boxes; I try them every once in a while, or adapt them and have a little fun in the kitchen.
Otto is correct. It’s down to labelling regulations.
Of course, it also means that manufacturers can be more sneaky, and show, say, strawberries with a strawberry-flavour (i.e. no strawberry content) mousse, by including the tiny text “Serving suggestion”. In other words: “There’s sod all strawberry in this, but feel free to throw a couple of strawberries of your own on top before you eat it!”
However there are limits:
from this site detailing UK labelling laws, for the benefit of exporters.
Actually, on studying the Food Standards Agency website, it looks like they have tightened up a bit:
That doesn’t mention the “Serving suggestion” clause, so the strawberry mousse example I gave might not be legal any more.
However, the general rule is as Otto said.
What Otto said.
We have exactly the same thing in the UK as well; I assume it is for the same reasons.
Manufacturers seem to put ‘serving suggestion’ even if there is nothing whatsoever in the photo other than the product- check out Weight Watchers products in the UK, which show the product unadulterated against a plain white background, but still take care to point out that this is a serving suggestion. ‘Plain white background not included’ is presumably the message here.
The vendor is not interested in how much imagination you have when using the product. The vendor is interested in providing large numbers of people with widely varying levels of imagination with more reasons to want to purchase the product more often.
A person who is quite adept at making tuna/macaroni salad and is proficient at heating prepared marina sauce and throwing it on top of penne pasta may see the “new” dish of tuna/penne salad and serve that in place of hot dogs and beans next month, increasing the sales of penne pasta by one box. Distributed across a nation of 290 million people, if 1 person in 500 chooses to make that switch, the pasta producer has increased sales by 580,000 units per month. (Numbers are obviuosly invented to make the point.) For every person who adds a recipe to their inventory, that is soe portion of the additional 580,000 that becomes repeat business. (Meanwhile, of course, the hot dog producers and canned bean producers are providing their own serving suggestions to thwart the pasta people or to reclaim their lost sales.)
It’s a way of covering for the possibility that the contents of the package may not actually look as nice as the picture on the outside, usually due to natural product variability, but maybe sometimes because the manufacturers have photographed something a bit nicer than what you’re buying; when you open the tin of hot dogs and find them to be a sort of greyish colour, instead of the vibrant red-brown on the label, you can’t complain because the label isn’t depicting the contents - it’s just telling you how you might choose to arrange them.
Slight aside – I saw a fascinating show on Food TV here in the US. Apparently advertisers could once do things like use plastic food for the perfect picture in their advertisements. But no more. Now they have to use actual product. An ad producer explained how they will ship hundreds of boxes of product to the shoot and open them all picking the best looking components (even down to picking one pea from a package) and assembling them into a whole for the photo.
Apparently they are allowed to use fake stuff if it is not what they are selling. So the strawberries on top of that mousse could be artificial since they are selling mousse, not strawberries.
Wish I could recall the name of the program, searching Food TV’s web page might reveal the title.
-rainy
To the OP: Are you asking about the practice of putting a picture of the product all served up nicely and garnished and ready to eat, with the words “Serving Suggestion” below the picture?
Or are you asking about the practice of putting recipes and serving suggestions, along the lines of “Hey! Try adding salsa!” or “Goes great with peas!”?
If the former, obviously it’s to make the product appear more attractive and appetizing. Which would make you more likely to buy a jar of hot fudge: a picture or brown syrup, or a picture of brown syrup poured over ice cream? It’s already been explained why they have to put the words “serving suggestion” on the package in that case.
If the latter, well, why not? People do occasionally use those suggestions; if you don’t want to, you can just ignore them.
By the way, Iceland_Blue, your posts would be more readable if you’d put spaces between the sentences.
I forgot to add, I first noticed the “serving suggestion” on cereal boxes when I was a kid: they’d have a picture of the cereal sitting in a bowl with milk, with maybe some toast and a glass of juice in the background. It’s kind of like how, in clothing ads, they don’t just show a picture of a shirt, they show a picture of somebody wearing the shirt. “Serving suggestion” means “What you see is not necessarily what you get.”
Or, as Dave Barry’s Grammar Person famously said, instead of “part of this nutricious breakfast” it should be “adjacent to this nutricious breakfast.”
nutritious, if that wasn’t clear, the first time :smack:
I googled ‘part of this nutritious breakfast’ to look for information on why the message might be required. Most of the search results seem to indicate that the phrase is widely thought to be deceitful – that it’s meant to make people include an unhealthy food in a ‘nutritious breakfast’ in the same way that McDonalds says their foods can be part of a ‘healthy, balanced diet’. I’m not sure that it’s the whole reason. I think it may also be intended to show to parents, particularly those who don’t know much about nutrition, that a bowl of cereal alone is not a complete or nutritious breakfast. Despite the fact that cereals are advertised as being ‘a source of 9 essential nutrients’, children who eat only a bowl of cereal with milk for breakfast might have trouble meeting all their nutritional needs later in the day. (For example, including a glass of orange juice in the ‘complete/nutritious breakfast’ ensures that one will get enough vitamin C, which might not be possible if lunch is a sandwich or a Lunchables and dinner is a Happy Meal.) So maybe the ‘complete breakfast’ pictures are meant to encourage people to eat a breakfast that would help them meet the USDA food groups requirements. There’s one exception – Vector, a ‘meal replacement’ meant for adults and sold by Kellogg’s in Canada but not the US (Kellogg’s doesn’t sell a meal replacement in the US, for some reason). Vector is a ‘complete breakfast’ because it has added protein and micronutrients, so the ‘part of a complete breakfast’ disclaimer isn’t needed.
Browsing the aisles at the Supermarket
“Poached Yak spleens? What would I ever do with…” Reads “Oh. … Wow.”