Figuring out what’s in a box of mass-produced chicken stock shouldn’t be that hard. Right?
Yet somehow it is not. A concentrated stock should still taste like stock after water is added back to it, and it should stillThat answer, at least, was easy to find.recipe columnist J. Kenji López-Alt told me over email. “The biggest one is the protein and specifically the gelatin content of boxed [versus] homemade stock. Boxed stock has virtually no gelatin, which means that it does not have the viscosity and richness of a homemade stock.
I didn’t expect to find someone’s grandma in a corporate kitchen, lovingly scaling a recipe from the old country. Eventually, I did have a video interview with a very kind woman from Campbell Soup Company’s so-called Culinary Innovation Hub, which covers both the Swanson and Pacific Foods lines of broths. Interestingly, Pacific Foods was one of the few brands that actually lists “water” and “chicken” as its first two ingredients . The Campbell representative was very knowledgeable, and excited to talk about the products as a general concept.
By declaring the established common or usual name of the ingredient followed by a parenthetical listing of all ingredients contained therein in descending order of predominance; or This, of course, ushered in yet another onslaught of mostly impenetrable bureaucratic hairsplitting: I was informed that the Food Standards and Labeling Policy Book requires a broth or stock to “have a Moisture Protein Ratio of 135:1 or below. The MPR is determined by dividing the percent moisture by the percent protein ... If it is above 135:1 it is under FDA jurisdiction and is labeled differently, e.g., ‘beef flavored broth.
To get some context for why this labeling was so confusing, I reached out to Michael Moss, the best-selling author of books like. “The first thing to kind of know about the USDA is it’s not working for us,” he told me over the phone. “It used to be the people’s agency, but it actually works for the food industry and one of its obligations, as it sees it, is its ability to help the companies to make a profit. So it hides things like where they get the ingredients and how they source them.
Progresso’s admission was enough to make me feel like I wasn’t completely losing my mind. But it also raised a few questions: Who are these third-party manufacturers? How many are there? How big are they? What are their names? Why have I never heard of them? The largest of the U.S. chicken broth manufacturers is Symrise; the second is Essentia Protein Solutions. Symrise, headquartered in Holzminden, Germany, listed sales of 3.83 billion Euros in 2021; its work encompasses everything from food and beverage products to cosmetic ingredients and “aroma molecules.” Or as Symrise proudly declares on its website, “You may be surprised to learn that people interact with our products on average 20-30 times per day.
Symrise, I also learned, is the largest producer of stock and broth in the U.S. . The representative disagreed with Kerry’s assessment that Symrise cares more about yield than quality.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Chicken Fried Data: Chick-Fil-A Hit With Class Action Privacy LawsuitChick-fil-A violated one of the US' only federal privacy laws by sharing video viewership data with Facebook, according to a new lawsuit.
Read more »
A Cult-Favorite Mayonnaise and 14 Other Things Our Editors Bought In JanuaryWe filled our carts with cozy slippers, travel bidets and an AirPod case shaped like a can of Spam.
Read more »
I bought a $50 Apple Watch Ultra clone, and it blew me away | Digital TrendsPebble Engage Cosmos is a brazen imitation of the Apple Watch Ultra that only costs $50. It looks and feels amazing, but as they say, beauty is only skin deep.
Read more »
San Jose senior community is bought by big Chicago real estate firmA senior citizen assisted living center in San Jose has been bought by a big real estate firm from Chicago, a purchase that’s part of a bigger $1.2 billion deal.
Read more »