Oh Nutella from the Jar, I love to eat you with a spoon.....
But as I was enjoying your hazelnutty chocolatey goodness (right now, you're an amazing substitute for chocolate when I get cravings) and not feeling at all guilty about eating you by the monster-spoonfuls, I started reading your pretty, pretty label.
Apparently, in every 400g jar of Nutella, there's a cup of skim milk, 56 hazelnuts and a hint of cocoa. That's cool, but I find the advertising claim and the label confusing and contradictory.
The list of ingredients is:
sugar, modified palm oil, hazelnuts, cocoa, skim milk powder, whey powder, lecithin, vanillin. And in BIG BOLD LETTERS TO AVOID ANY SORT OF LAWSUIT: "CONTAINS: HAZELNUTS, MILK, SOY" (Where's the soy you ask....it's in the lecithin, a soy by-product that acts as a lubricant and a sweetener..yay Food Science class!)
Now if you know anything about food labeling combined with advertising, you should be scratching your head right now. You should be asking yourself, "Self, how can there be one cup of skim milk in a 400g jar and the two ingredients that make up the skim milk be the 5th and 6th ingredients?"
Honestly, I have no idea, but I'm going to try to apply logic to the situation.
Here's how I see it:
A cup of milk is 250 mL. Assuming milk has the same, or similar density, as water, 250 mL of milk should also be equal to 250g. That's well over half of what's in the jar. There should be more milk - or milk soilds, or whatever - than some of the other ingredients, likely combined. Given there's only a "hint of cocoa" there should be more milk that cocoa. According to the label, there's more cocoa than milk, and more sugar than anything else.
According to the Nutella Website, a hazelnut has a mass of 0.85g (they say it "weighs 0.85g" but I think they're appealing to the colloquial and layman's audience). Assuming that there's "56 roasted hazelnuts in each 400g jar", I'm not too sure that that's enough hazelnutty goodness to meet their advertising and labeling claims. Assuming a 10% loss in mass over the roasting process (yay Food Science class, take TWO!), the average hazelnut now has a mass of 0.765g. With 56 of them, there's about 42.84g of hazelnuts in each 400g jar.
NOOOOOO!!!!!! Nutella, YOU LIE!!!
Now, when companies make an ingredient list, they are required to make the list of ingredients in decreasing order, meaning that the most abundant ingredient is listed first, the second most abundant listed second and so on.....you get the point.
I'm a little disappointed after some simple math that first of all "sugar" is the most abundant ingredient and according to their advertising claim, there should be 42.85g of hazelnuts and 250g of skim milk in each 400g jar. If that's the case, why is hazelnuts listed before milk solids in the ingredient list. AND WHY FOR GOD'S SAKE DO THEY CLAIM THAT THERE'S A "HINT OF COCOA" IN EACH JAR WHEN COCOA IS LISTED BEFORE MILK SOILDS!!!!??? WHY!?? WWHHHHHYYYYY!!!!???
400g Nutella jar label, you disappoint. I'm going to continue to enjoy you with a very large spoon, when I need a "chocolate hit", but from now on, I'm pulling off the labels as soon as the jar hits my pantry shelf. They're very disturbing....
