Cooking & EatingDo you ever buy a bag or jar of spice mix in the supermarket? There is a good chance that this contains less herbs than you think. With spice mixes and mixes for meat, fish or a meal, you often pay for cheap fillings such as salt, breadcrumbs, sugar or onion.
People often use a spice mix to flavor a meal. Easy, because everything is put together in just the right proportion for you. Although herbs… in the bags and jars regularly appear to be few herbs and spices.
This is apparent from a sample of the Consumers’ Association, which identified the most striking examples in the health guide of December. The Consumers’ Association argues for stricter rules that limit misleading packaging and the addition of large amounts of salt.
An example of something the Consumers’ Association came across: the meat mixes from Lidl and Aldi consist of up to three quarters of salt. The spice mixes from manufacturer Verstegen also contain a lot of salt: the mix for chicken traditionally contains no less than 69 percent salt and the mix for stew contains 31 percent salt. Maggi’s spice mixes also contain a lot of salt. Where you expect that a bag of spice blend nutmeg mainly contains nutmeg, it turns out to consist of 60 percent salt and only 6 percent of the spice. The name is not misleading, according to Maggi’s response, because ‘the word melange makes it clear that it is not a pure nutmeg, but a melange of flavors’.
“Consumers have come to appreciate salt because it is added to everything,” said spokesman Babs van der Staak of the Consumers’ Association. “The only way to turn the tide and get people used to a less salty taste is to stop with products that contain a disproportionate amount of salt.” Verstegen thinks that people do indeed get used to the fact that salt and cutting back cannot be done too quickly. ‘Then there is a chance that the consumer will add extra salt after all.’
Spice mixes often contain flour, sugars and onion
According to the Consumers’ Association, with various mixes for minced herbs, you mainly pay for breadcrumbs, while manufacturers do not always clearly state this. “We think these are marketing tricks,” says Van der Staak. ,,As far as we’re concerned, there should at least be communication about the main ingredient on the front of these types of mixes. Manufacturers are apparently aware that they don’t convince consumers to buy the product with these kinds of ingredients, but then they shouldn’t use it either.”
Jumbo’s Herb mix for minced meat butcher recipe contains no less than 79 percent breadcrumbs and Maggi’s beef steak stew mix contains 62 percent flour. When asked why breadcrumbs are not on the front of the product, there is no response from Verstegen and Silvo.
It turns out that Maggi’s herb mix contains no herbs and spices at all, Jumbo’s mix contains only 0.04 percent lovage. Sugars are also a cheap filler. Calvé’s salad mixes mainly contain sugars and a maximum of 12 percent herbs. Manufacturer Silvo also adds a lot of sugar to the stew mixes. Silvo says he adds corn syrup to the recipe mixes “to balance the flavor of the potato-based dishes.”
Scissoring onions under herbs not in violation of the Commodities Act
Onion is also a popular, cheap filling. Jumbo’s spice mix for potato contains 47 percent of this vegetable and consists of only 1 percent herbs (majoraan) and 11 percent spices. Verstegen’s mix for salmon consists of 59 percent onion and only 5 percent dill and a little thyme. The latter mix is converted to 60 euros per kilo. Quite a lot, when you consider that a kilo of onion costs a fraction of that.
Manufacturer Silvo counts onion among the spices and herbs in its spice mixes. According to the NVWA, this is not in conflict with the Commodities Act, because the vague definition of herbs and spices leaves room for labeling vegetables as a spice. “Some manufacturers interpret this definition less broadly than other manufacturers,” explains Van der Staak. “Sometimes onion is not counted as a spice. That makes it unnecessarily confusing for the consumer.”
The pure spice mixture Napoli from Verstegen gives rise to the suggestion that the mix consists of a mixture of spices. But the mix is filled with tomato for the most part and contains only 12 percent spice. ‘In this case, the word pure refers to the use of pure ingredients and says nothing about the composition of the mix,’ says Verstegen.
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