The soft-serve ice creams sold by convenience store chains as containing natural ingredients should be subject to inspection to prevent misleading advertising, a legislator said yesterday.
Scorching summer heat has been the best promoter of the ice creams, with the convenience store chains now in fierce competition.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) raised the attention of the food authority and consumers to possible false advertising by the ice cream sellers, which have branded their flavored products with simple fruit names.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The convenience stores tout their soft-serve ice creams as made from pure fruit juice, stewed fruit or fruit from certain famous growing areas, without specifying the presence of other ingredients and chemical additives, Wang said.
“It would have the consumers mistakenly believe that the soft-serve ice cream is mainly made out of natural fruit,” she said.
At a press conference, she showed that adding a few drops of food coloring could render white, vanilla-flavored soft-serve ice cream as yellow as the mango or cantaloupe-flavored ones now popular among convenience store customers.
Hsu Hui-yu (許惠玉), head of the food nutrition section at the John Tung Foundation, said that while many brands have claimed to have milk in their ice-cream products, “the proportion could be lower than 20 percent.”
“Much more of them is made up of gelling agent, emulsifier, food flavorings or food colorings,” she said, adding that a serving of soft-serve ice cream contains more than 200 calories — that amounts to a bowl of rice or two spoons of oil and four sugar cubes.
Hsu also said that so far, only FamilyMart and McDonald’s have released information about the calories contained on their Web sites, and advised others to follow suit, while Wang called on the enterprises to label all of the contained ingredients.
Food and Drug Administration official Hsueh Fu-chin (薛復琴) said the existing Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) did not require unpackaged food to have labels specifying the contained ingredients or additives.
Hsueh has promised to discuss with the food enterprises possible measures on revealing necessary information to consumers.
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