Eli5: How do secret food recipes stay secret if the ingredients have to be disclosed?
In: 2
Ingredients don’t all have to be disclosed in their entirety, especially if the producer argued the recipe as propriety. Things like spices, herbs, acid, which can greatly influence the flavor aren’t always listed, instead a broad term covers them. Let’s take KFC for instance. They share that they have “11 herbs and spices”, well that can create virtually infinite possibilities. In the case of things like Coca Cola, they may have “and natural flavoring” or some other workaround. Also the quantity of any given ingredient isn’t listed and in some cases can change the end result if only off by a gram or two.
The ingredients for a cake are: flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, shortening, eggs, milk, vanilla extract.
But just knowing that list of ingredients doesn’t mean you know how to bake a cake. You also have to know the exact amount of each ingredient, how to mix them together, what temperature to set the oven to, and how long to bake it.
Imagine if you just grabbed a random amount of each ingredient, threw it all into a pan without mixing, and then baked it at a random temperature for a random amount of time. You used all the right ingredients, but the end result isn’t going to be a cake you would want to eat.
The simple answer is that the authority you have to disclose the recipe to, is bound by a non-disclosure clause in the law that forces the manufacturer to provide the information to them.
You can also pay some attention to what the manufacturer has to disclose on their packaging, and how they have to disclose it.
This applies to the market where I live, so the regulations may be different elsewhere,
– ingredients must be listed in a volume-percentage order or a weight-percentage order, depending on type of product. But you don’t need to disclose the actual percentages.
– with the exception of ingredients that you name on the packaging. If the packaging claims that the product is *Apple juice*, the percentage of apple product in the sold product must be disclosed.
The idea here is to keep the producers honest. But it also makes life tricky for vegetable-based meat alternatives, that have to put in effort to reveal on the packaging that the pretty nice looking meat patty *isn’t* in fact a hamburger, but something that could replace one if you are looking for a veggie based option. (which is also culturally defined, because the hamburger chains are doing their very best to promote vegetarian and vegan alternatives to the patties nowadays, and there is a gentle slide on the scale when it comes to the definition that you can see if you compare what it was like a decade or two ago.)
– if a product is generally expected to contain one ingredient (let’s reuse the example; apple juice is generally agreed to be expected to actually contain apples) it cannot have that products name if it also doesn’t contain the generally expected ingredient.
This is why some drink mixes and stuff like that have names that in no way what so ever contains the word “juice” in them.
– some things are nearly always trade secrets, such as spices. To accommodate this, the regulations say that unless it is a mix of spices that is the actual product, you are allowed to disclose all of the spices as *spices*, further unspecified. Unless it’s a certain percentage threshold, because then it has to be disclosed anyway.
This, in itself, is creating a huge problem for some people who are allergic to obscure spices. Manufacturers who “act responsibly” instead go out of their way to reveal EXACTLY what is in their product, as a statement in how they cater to as many peoples needs as possible.
The alternative is that a non-profit organisation collects allergy information and avails it to it’s members in a manner that makes it near-impossible to figure out all of the things in a certain product, as a way to work around the manufacturer wish to not disclose; the organisation typically gets the FULL list of ingredients, but need to present it in a way that doesn’t fully disclose the contents.
So…most of the time you are going to realise that the disclosure requirement is not actually fully revealing the entire trade secret. Just the parts of it that is relevant to people with allergies.
Not all ingredients get disclosed. Often the differentiation is the “natural flavors” or other vague discriptor.
Also while ingredients are disclosed, the quantities, treatment of ingredients and preparation of recipe aren’t disclosed. Maybe it’s a secret cookie recipe — what’s ratio of regular sugar to brown sugar? Is butter cold stick, whipped, melted, melted and browned? How coarsely is the flour milled? How long and at what temp are the cookies baked?
Latest Answers