Johannesburg - As regular readers of this column will know, I’ve got a special interest in date marks: those best-before, use-by and sell-by dates which are intended to protect consumers from buying food which is stale, or worse, potentially harmful to our health.
Remember Simon Mathale, the inspiring young entrepreneur from Mamelodi who started a one-man food-monitoring project in his area, visiting stores big and small to check the date marks on their products?
About 40 percent of the smaller stores in his area sold baby formula way beyond its best-by date, he told Consumer Watch.
I spent a day with Mathale in April as he did the rounds in Mabopane, noting “expired” stock and engaging store owners on their stock management shortcomings.
Armed with a clipboard and a smile, he introduced himself as “Simon from the Food Monitoring Project”, asked if he could check the “expiry dates” on the food products in the store, and in he went.
“Few question where I am from,” he told me. “The way I see it, inspectors from the municipality seldom, if ever, get to these shops, so at least the shop owners feel that they are accountable to someone.
“And most do take what I have to say very well, and change their practices.”
Well, as it turns out, government officials – with the National Consumer Commission (NCC) – did an inspection blitz of stores in several municipalities in Mpumalanga and North West in June, “to examine the state of compliance with the labelling requirements of the CPA, as well as related regulations”.
“Related regulations” included those pertaining to the labelling and advertising of foodstuff, which fall under the health department.
It’s those regulations which cover date marks (see below).
I found out about these wide-ranging investigations in a splash report in The Times a few weeks ago: “An NCC investigation has lifted the lid on widespread unlawful alteration, replacement and removal of food labels at Shoprite, Spar, OK Foods, U-save and other stores”.
As many as 84 retailers, ranging from national supermarket brands to spaza shops, were found to have tampered with labels on eggs, milk, tea, mincemeat, baby formula, chocolates, biscuits and cheese.
Commission inspectors were reportedly shocked by what they’d seen, including food labels erased or torn off and homemade labels with false expiry dates placed over original labels.
The head of the commission’s inspection team was quoted as saying that one shop manager admitted that he had instructed his staff to remove the labels from products that had passed their expiry date, saying he had not had enough time to sell the products and was losing money.
Naturally, I wanted to know why a government agency had not put out a general press release on the findings of its inspections, in the public interest. And I asked for a copy of the report.
Consumer commissioner Ebrahim Mohamed apologised, saying he knew nothing about the release of the investigation findings, as his staff had not followed “correct protocol and procedure”.
“A press conference and a media release would have been the best and most appropriate way to go,” he conceded.
As for my request for the report, Mohamed said as it was not “a full-scale NCC investigation”, there was no investigation report, and provided me with just a summary of the commission’s findings, which lumped all the shops in each district together, with a vague round-up of their combined regulatory shortcomings.
Disappointing, to say the least.
Let’s hope that future investigations, undertaken with public funds, will be made public more professionally.
Meanwhile, I continue to get reports from readers about date-mark tampering in major urban supermarkets, which suggests that the commitment articulated by their head offices isn’t being shared by the managers at ground level, in some cases.
Example one: Spar’s ‘mistake’ puzzling
Bronwyn Pithey wrote to Consumer Watch about her experience with a pack of ham she bought from the Spar in the Cape Quarter mall in Greenpoint, Cape Town, on August 30.
The sell-by date on the Spar label on the front of the pack was September 12, with the date it was packed being declared as August 20.
But on the back of the pack she found the supplier’s original date mark – best before August 15, with the packed date being July 21.
In other words, by the time Pithey bought the product, it was already, according to the supplier, two weeks past its prime. The “shelf life” of that meat product had been extended by a month.
When Pithey brought this to the butchery manager’s attention, she was told it was a mistake, she says.
Given that the apparent re-dating happened after the publicity around the NCC investigation findings, in which Spar stores were implicated, along with other major supermarket brands, one would have thought that there’d be extra attention focused on this issue currently.
Speaking on behalf of the store, Leonard Labuschagne repeated that it must have been a case of human error.
“We aspire to the highest possible standards when dealing with stock coming into our store – especially perishable products.”
That particular ham was very popular, he said, and usually sold out every week.
“I have spoken to the staff and emphasised the importance of ensuring that all stock on the shelf has the correct labels. We will monitor the department to ensure that this does not happen again.”
At least in the ham case, the supplier’s original, genuine date marks were not removed or obscured, just overshadowed by revised dates which that Spar had created, which appeared on the front, rather than the back of the pack.
At the root of any consumer-company relationship is trust. Practices such as re-dating food products, withholding small change and not ensuring that till prices match those on the shelf, erode consumer trust and damage the entire brand.
Example two: Simply not the case
Often a food package fully complies with legislation, yet consumers find it misleading.
Fruit juice, for example, can be made from concentrate and contain certain additives, yet still legally qualify to be labelled “100% juice”, and I regularly hear from readers who feel that’s misleading.
Dr Harris Steinman of Cape Town recently bought a pack of Simply Cereal All Swiss muesli, based on its front-of-pack claim to contain “30% fruit and nuts”.
“My surprise on opening the package was how little fruit and nuts I could see,” he said.
So he painstakingly separated the fruit and nuts from the rest and then measured and photographed them, finding that the fruit and nuts did not even represent about an eighth of the total contents, by volume. The fruit and nuts weighed about 26 percent of the total weight of the product.
“Which means that by weight, the claim is true, but visually, not at all. Would this be misleading?”
Responding, Tiger Brands’ corporate affairs group executive Alex Mathole said the fruit and nut ingredients and their content were “specifically noted in the ingredients list” as required by the food labelling regulations.
“Thus the total amount of fruit and nuts is correctly declared on the pack, and we believe that the product is clear in its description and not misleading to the consumer.”
That may be true, I said, but I think it’s fair to say that most consumers would expect to open the pack and find that a third of the contents and what one experiences on eating the product, mouthful after mouthful, would be the fruit and nuts, which is far from the case.
Luckily, for the manufacturers, the fruit and nuts – the most expensive component of the muesli – are far heavier than flakes of wheat and oats.
But don’t open the pack and expect to find that almost a third of the contents, by bulk, are fruit and nuts.
Incidentally, investigation of this case revealed something else – older packs of Simply Cereal carried the claim “40% fruit and nuts”, so the makers at some point altered the recipe to reduce the fruit and nut content.
I asked Tiger Brands when that was and why, but hadn’t received a response at the time of writing.
The dos and don’ts regarding date marks
The new food labelling regulations, which came into force in March 2012, make it compulsory for food manufacturers to put date stamps on food, with the exception of a few items such as honey, unprocessed, unpacked meat and fresh produce, vinegar and sweets.
Foods that have to be chilled, cooked products, pre-packed, prepared vegetables and fruit, juices with a limited shelf life – in fact, any food which could lead to food poisoning if not stored properly – must carry a use-by date.
Retailers may choose to display a “sell by” date as well.
It is illegal to offer for sale, and to re-label or donate, any food which is past its use-by date. Other foods – those with a longer shelf life – must carry “best before” dates, and while it’s not an offence to continue to sell such, it’s clearly not in consumers’ best interests to spend good money on it.
The Star