I would think that would be a really weird name for tomato sauce and look at the rest of the label to figure out. Now if it said “Tomato sauce with beef style protein”, I would not think it contained meat.
My apologies. I agree that the Rastelli’s page is unclear and poorly labels (especially since elsewhere at your linked page, they use “plant-based” for another product.
I think just listing it as VBites Ground Beef is a bit unfortunate, but have little sympathy with someone shopping on that site and deciding to scroll all the way down to the plant based products and buy some without investigating what VBites is and how that distinguishes it from the other Ground Beef product.
And if “duck style” is a novelty to you, I have no sympathy with you not looking into how it is used, or you being annoyed by the novel usage.
On the other hand, can we please go back in time and scream at the people who popularized “chicken scampi” until they realize the error of their ways?
That’s only reasonable if you’re aware that you’re in the plant-based products section. There’s no note of it being the plant-based product section in the section itself.
If you just happen to have randomly scrolled down the page and weren’t aware you were in the plant-based section and you were aware that this website sells meat, I feel the most reasonable assumption would be that a product described as beef was in fact beef.
VBites, which only sells vegetarian products, makes it clear that its products are individually labeled as being meat-free. I feel that this other site, which sells both meat products and vegetarian meat substitutes on the same page, should put more effort into labeling which is which. It certainly shouldn’t be putting less effort into this, which is what I feel it does by taking VBites products which were clearly labeled and renaming them with more ambiguous terms.
I feel that you’re back-handedly agreeing with my point. The fact that you would feel the need to investigate further if you saw a label that said “Beef Style Tomato Sauce” demonstrates that “style” is not a term which clearly describes the product. If “Beef Style” was clear in its meaning, you would have just taken the jar off the shelf and put it in your cart without feeling the need to read any further.
But who would describe a tomato as beef? There’s no connection. You can’t just link two things together with the word style and claim it proves a point.
Bolognese-style tomato sauce would make more sense as an example. Perhaps it’s not an authentic bolognese sauce, or it’s a vegan adaptation with soy meat, or uses ground chicken instead of beef but with similar seasonings. It is similar enough to a bolognese that you’re letting people know what experience to expect.
Yeah, no. I fully stand by my statement even if changed to “I think just listing it as VBites Ground Beef is a bit unfortunate, but have little sympathy with someone shopping on that site and deciding to scroll all the way down to the bottom and buy one of the VBites products grouped there without investigating what VBites is and how that distinguishes it from the other Ground Beef product.” It being the “plant-based products section” was not the point. Those products being grouped together at the bottom was.
Even more reasonable, from my point of view, is not to have sympathy with someone who buys $35 worth of “ground beef” either without checking how much that weighs, or without reading even the first line of the product description after clicking through to find the box size and discovering it is $16 per pound.
In my opinion, listing it just as VBites Ground Beef is unfortunate, but my sympathy levels are as described previously.
Now if the page had a search function, which it seems to me it doesn’t, so that you could get just the two “ground beef” products side to side, I would feel slightly differently, but also, wouldn’t you then want to know why one was cheaper than the other?
A real change though would be if the consequences were worse than ending up with a non-meat product you didn’t want, once.
No, because a label that simply says “Beef Tomato Sauce” is not a thing, so “Beef-style Tomato Sauce” is just a nonsense phrase. It would be “Tomato Sauce with Beef” or “Tomato Sauce with meat-style pieces,” in which case the -style means it is implicitly not meat.
This is a thread about a company that described a vegetable product as “beef style”. So I don’t see why you feel the hypothetical of a company labeling a product “beef style tomato sauce” is unrealistic or has no connection to the topic.
I don’t disagree, but why should a customer have to go through all of that when the manufacturer can be much more forthcoming about what the product is? I understand puffery and all that, but what the company is selling is not beef or duck or any sort of meat.
Meat-substitute, or meat-imitation, or meat-flavored are all fine. But to say that it is “styled” like beef is just a nonsense term in context and is misleading.
I guess I have trouble imagining what ever else “style” in that context could mean, except that it’s not duck, pork, or chicken.
Duplicate post
That’s sort of the point. It’s meaningless. Vegetables made to possibly imitate the taste of a duck are not in the “style” of a duck. Whatever “style” or presentation a duck has, it is still at its core, a meaty real duck.
The issue I have (and I think the others have) is that it is meant to be deliberately misleading. They don’t want to use words like “fake” or “imitation” so they are pressing the envelope as far as they can to make it sound like you are getting duck.
The only purpose that misleading advertisements serve is to take money from the less educated and likely the poorest people. There is no corresponding social good to come from it. I’m all for free market capitalism. If you want to sell duck flavored vegetables, then have at it, but put on the package clearly what you are selling. No bullshit.
They use words to suggest that it’s not duck, when in fact it’s not duck. That’s the opposite of misleading.
You’re begging the question.
Now, an example of misleading would be if they went with UltraFilter’s suggestion, and called it “duck flavored vegetables”, when the vegetables are not, in fact, flavored with duck.
Hell of a lot better than vegetable flavored duck.
No, disagree with all of this. It’s marketing. No different than every other product out there.