Poland was informed about the financial penalty imposed on Masmal Dairy for misleading customers. As shown by the control of the Trade Inspection, the company’s extra butter contained 60 percent. vegetable fat that should not be in butter at all. How to protect yourself from such dishonest producers?
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I heard about the Masmal scam and I am scared and furious at the same time. I have been buying this butter for a long time and it never occurred to me that I was eating a fake! Please tell me how to protect yourself from such dishonest producers? Is there any way to recognize real butter?
Maryla 60 l.
Food producer fraud does and will happen. The proceedings against Masmal were initiated in 2013, we had to wait until 2015 to wait for the verdict. Therefore, it is actually better to make informed choices yourself and learn to distinguish a fake from the original without waiting for the matter to be resolved. How do you recognize real butter?
1. We check the name on the package. Theoretically, we should look for a product with the word ‘butter’, because according to the nomenclature (Stołykwo and Rutkowska 2007), only a product with a milk fat content in the range of 80-90% can be used. A cube of butter should contain up to 16 percent. water and up to 2 percent. non-fat milk dry matter (e.g. protein). Theoretically. Butter is a very often counterfeit product, the latter situation only confirms us in this fact. In addition, producers of mixes use various tricks to circumvent the law, e.g. they name ‘Meadow’, ‘Perfect’, etc., which suggests that the product is butter, although there is no such information on the packaging, or at least it shouldn’t be.
3/4 fat butter contains 60-62 percent. milk fat and not a gram of vegetable, and semi-skimmed butter – from 39-41 percent. milk fat and not a gram of vegetable.
2. Let us not be influenced by the graphics of the packaging. This is absolutely no determinant. If the producer wants us to think that the mix is butter, he will do everything to make the packaging look like that of a counterfeit product. The graphic design with cows, grass, a bowl of milk, etc. evokes the appropriate associations, so it’s easy to get confused.
3. We check the list of ingredients. In the list of ingredients of real butter, nothing should appear except milk fat and possibly salt and natural colors. If there is an addition of vegetable fat, such a product should not be called butter. Only butter with the appropriate composition goes to the next stage of verification.
4. We smell. Real butter smells delicately, has no distinct aroma, in the blends of butter and margarine / oils you can feel a more or less pronounced margarine aroma.
5. We check the hardness. But it’s more at home. Real butter, when taken out of the fridge, is very hard and hard to spread. Then you can almost be sure that we bought what we expected.
6. We taste. It is not easy to recognize the taste of an addition of vegetable fat. A real gourmand, however, should be able to handle it.
We live in a time when we cannot be sure of anything, if we do not take care of the safety of the food we buy, it may turn out that for months or even years we will be serving ourselves pseudo-products and fakes, paying for the originals. There are things that cannot be checked, but as much as we can control our shopping cart.
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