Tales of Deceptive Marketing – Crisco Vegetable Oil
Food products are notoriously deceptive in their packaging imagery and contents, so I thought I’d pay a little more attention and highlight them on Market Misfit as I see them with a new series called “Tales of Deceptive Marketing”.
I’ll start with a short story.
I love popcorn. I really, really love popcorn. I love popcorn so much I have perfected the art of stovetop popcorn cooking, and here’s a copy of my Popcorn Recipe on Hubpages if you’d like to see it.
The oil you use when cooking popcorn is important to the taste. I prefer Canola (also known attractively as “rapeseed” oil) over vegetable oil, but Saturday night I was Canola-less and discovered a bottle of Crisco Veggie Oil buried deep in the bowels of my kitchen cabinetry.
My craving for popcorn was unstoppable, so I poured some of Crisco’s finest into the bottom of a pan and did what any curious marketing-minded individual would do and took a look at the label.
Let’s see what Crisco uses to illustrate the contents of its Vegetable oil:
Delicious looking cutlets of peppers, some broccoli, cucumbers, some lettuce. Yes, a whole freakin’ garden salad of oil must go into this thing. I imagine 10 people pressing down big bowls of garden salad, collecting the output, squeezing and filtering all of the healthy fats right out of the whole mess. I wonder how many of these veggies it takes to produce a whole bottle of Crisco’s oil?
Now let’s take a look at the back, less attractive underbelly of the Crisco Pure Veggie Oil label. How much wholesale produce goes into Crisco’s oil?
INGREDIENTS: SOYBEAN OIL
Yes, soybean oil, the dirt cheap mass-produced solvent-seperated oil of Monsanto’s finest crop!
The history of oils is a long and lengthy one; I won’t get into that. But I will say that cooking with Canola or Olive oil is far healthier and tastes far better than Vegetable Oil.
Have any experiences with veggie oil or more deceptive marketing products in the grocery store? Feel free to post in the comments below.
Similar Posts:
- A Compilation of the Most Useful Market Misfit Posts
- Tales of Deceptive Marketing – Cracked.com’s List of 6 Words Advertisers Love and “Hungry Man” Frozen Meals
- Tales of Deceptive Marketing – It’s not Delivery, It’s Digiorno. They’re not Wings, they’re WYNGZ.
- Tales of Deceptive Marketing – “You Deserve It” and Entitlements in Advertising
- Google’s New Adwords Feature – Request A Call
April 16th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
I’m not privy to the history of oils nor knowledgeable on what they can do to ones body but I thought soybeans and various soy products were generally thought of as positive for ones health (in moderation of course…not sure I’d ever buy into taking a TBS of Soybean Oil a day to keep the doctor away)
April 19th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Good call, Andy.
There are arguments against an entirely soy oil diet due to the nature of the fats in them, but I can’t really get into all that with any real debate to be honest. I do know that lighter Olive Oils and hemp oils contain better fats for digestion. My main point is that this and other veggie oils imply that it’s “healthy” by putting a garden salad on the label when the contents of the product really have nothing to do with it. In fact it should just be called “Soybean Oil” since that’s all it contains. I wonder if the reason the attention isn’t drawn to this is because they don’t want the average consumer to pay that much attention to the nutrition of the product, or because most recipes called for Vegetable Oil vs. Soybean Oil? It’s probably the latter but neither would surprise me.
September 30th, 2010 at 9:34 am
[...] These three niche posts on random topics brought over half of the Google traffic to Market Misfit this [...]