How did it happen? I didn’t look past the branding.

The package has a stamp of Michigan and a great slogan: old fashioned goodness. Local and traditionally prepared? There’s no way they use artificial ingredients.

I was wrong. “Michigan Brand” cottage cheese uses modern production techniques and artificial flavoring to extend the product’s shelf life.

I’ve noticed this happening often when products are marketed as old-fashioned. The slogan is meant for us to imagine an era when time and tender loving care were put into our meals.

It’s something I’ve been much more careful about. Owners can change. Recipes do change. I need to check and recheck the foods I buy.

Unilever is a Dutch/British conglomerate that manufactures more consumer products than you’d like to know about. The tea wing of Unilever is LIPTON, a logo you can find in grocery and convenience stores worldwide.

Unlike sodas loaded with high fructose corn syrup and caramel coloring, bottled tea is cheapest when its only ingredients are tea and water.

LIPTON offers a basic line of tea packaged in plastic bottles (or aluminum cans), and an upscale line called PureLeaf which is packaged in glass. Aside from the container’s material, there’s also a difference in ingredients.

Let’s run through some of LIPTON’s products. Thanks to them for posting their ingredient listings online.

LIPTON’s basic line

Ingredients in LIPTON Iced Green Tea with Citrus

Green Tea (Water, Green Tea Extract from Tea Leaves), Sugar, Citric Acid, Natural Flavor, Acerola, Fruit Extract, REB A (Purified Stevia Extract)

Oddly, LIPTON doesn’t offer a basic unflavored iced tea. Maybe I’m missing it. They brand this iced green tea as 100% natural, and it is. A few more ingredients than you’d expect, but they are natural.

Ingredients in LIPTON Diet Lemon Iced Tea

Water, citric acid, tea, sodium hexametaphosphate (to protect flavor), natural flavor, phosphoric acid, potassium sorbate and potassium benzoate (preserve freshness), sucralose, pectin, acesulfame potassium, calcium disodium edta (to protect flavor)

A glass of unsweetened green or black tea contains fewer calories than a Tic-Tac. It’s hard to sell unflavored tea, so LIPTON tosses in sweeteners and flavors to fill out its product line. Rather than fall back on unsweetened tea, they load up their diet version with artificial sweetener (in this case, Acesulfame K).

Ingredients in LIPTON Sweet Iced Tea

Water, high fructose corn syrup, tea, phosphoric acid, sodium hexametaphosphate (to protect flavor), potassium sorbate and potassium benzoate (preserve freshness), caramel color, calcium disodium edta (to protect flavor), natural flavor, red 40.

Traditionally, sweet tea is made by adding sugar during the brewing process. From the ingredient list, we cannot determine what LIPTON is doing to make their ‘Sweet Iced Tea’. At some point, they are adding high fructose corn syrup. And because the tea isn’t quite the right color, LIPTON adds Red #40—a synthetic dye.

LIPTON’s PureLeaf line

PureLeaf is an all-natural, upscale spinoff of LIPTON’s basic bottled beverages. They even gave PureLeaf its own website.

Ingredients in LIPTON PureLeaf Unsweetened Iced Tea

Brewed tea from Lipton tea leaves, citric acid (provides tartness)

LIPTON gets fancy here. You’re not just drinking tea, you’re drinking tea brewed from Lipton tea leaves.

Ingredients in LIPTON PureLeaf Sweetened Iced Tea

Brewed tea from Lipton tea leaves, sugar, natural apple extract (color), citric acid (provides tartness)

Compared to the basic line, PureLeaf’s sweet tea is very refreshing. Instead of HFCS you get sugar. The only oddity is that they enhance the color by adding apple extract. Apparently Lipton tea leaves don’t make the beverage dark enough.

Though the packaging often advertises guarana, taurine, and other micronutrients, the energy of energy drinks really comes from its blend of sugar and caffeine. It’s not complicated. And just like soda, energy drinks are inexpensive to produce. You’re buying your preferred brand of sugar, caffeine, and assorted flavoring.

That’s okay, though. I’m not railing against energy drinks. After spending a few years downing Red Bulls and Monsters, I re-discovered all-natural energy drinks in the cooler of my local natural foods store. GURU and Steaz look like the biggest names in the natural energy market.

Let’s see how some energy drinks compare, ingredient-wise.

Comparing energy drinks

I err on the side of natural. I haven’t had a Red Bull in years, but I have tried some of the all-natural varieties. They are tasty. And they cost a bit less than a latte (though they are certainly not cheap).

Though the natural-ness of caramel color is up for debate, it’s great to see another company moving away from HFCS and putting a generally authentic product on the shelf.

Of course, I’m only speaking for Pepsi Throwback. Mountain Dew Throwback, despite using sugar, still has a mess of oddities in its ingredient listing.

Ingredients in Pepsi Throwback

Carbonated water, sugar, caramel color, phosphoric acid, caffeine, natural flavor

Ingredients in Mountain Dew Throwback

Carbonated water, sugar, citric acid, natural and artificial flavor, sodium benzoate, caffeine, gum arabic, brominated vegetable oil, yellow 5.

According to the ingredient label, standard Mountain Dew contains the following ingredients:

Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, concentrated orange juice, citric acid, natural flavor, sodium benzoate (preservative), caffeine, sodium citrate, erythorbic acid (preservative), gum arabic, calcium disodium EDTA (preservative), brominated vegetable oil, and Yellow 5.

Despite the number of interesting labels in that list, it actually surprises me in a good way. There does not seem to be any use of artificial flavor.

And that makes the cat picture above quite happy. Still, though, there are even a few ingredients I have rarely seen in food, namely erythorbic acid and brominated vegetable oil. Some research indicates that erythorbic acid is just an isomer of ascorbic acid (vitamin C), and is produced from natural sucrose. Brominated vegetable oil has been used, for decades, as an emulsifier to keep citrus flavors distributed throughout the beverage. Because oil would otherwise rise to the top of the liquid, it is precisely brominated (made heavier) to match the density of water. Mountain Dew isn’t just made—it is very carefully engineered.

There are two clearly artificial ingredients in Mountain Dew: Calcium disodium EDTA and Yellow 5. Yellow 5 has a long history as a synthetic coloring agent. EDTA is a bit different.You can read more about it in a past article devoted to EDTA.

Ingredients in a Twix bar

Milk Chocolate (Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Milk Ingredients, Cocoa Mass, Lactose, Soy Lecithin, Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate, Artificial Flavour), Enriched Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Sugar, Hydrolyzed Palm and Palm Kernel Oil, Corn Syrup, Milk Ingredients, Dextrose, Salt, Cocoa Mass, Sodium Bicarbonate, Soy Lecithin, Soybean Oil, Artificial Flavor.

Twix’s ingredients surprised me. In a good way.

The artificial flavor in the milk chocolate is likely vanillin and there’s a little bit of artificial flavoring used elsewhere—otherwise this is a decent real food showing for processed, high-markup candy.

My only question coming away from this is: What the heck is polyglycerol polyricinoleate? I’ve never seen that before on a food label.

Cool Ranch is, perhaps, the most popular flavor of Doritos. It stands to reason that Cool Ranch is the baseline for what we can expect from other Doritos products.

Ingredients in Cool Ranch Doritos

Whole corn, vegetable oil, corn maltodextrin, salt, tomato powder, corn starch, lactose, whey, nonfat milk, corn syrup solids, onion powder, sugar, garlic powder, monosodium glutamate, cheddar cheese, dextrose, malic acid, buttermilk, natural and artificial flavors, sodium acetate, Red #40, Blue #1, Yellow #5, sodium caseinate, spice, citric acid, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate.

(Ingredients listed by Frito-Lay website in 2011)

Though the list looks intimidatingly long, it is similar to other flavored snack chips. One major difference I notice is the use of artificial flavors and artificial coloring.

Artificial coloring in a corn-chip? where? Let’s zoom in on the earlier photo.

Those specks of red must be the synthetic Red #40. It’s hard to know what Blue #1 and Yellow #5 are doing, but my guess is that they play similar roles in adding minor aesthetic enhancement to the chip.

• Dip for french fries.
• Hamburger condiment.
• Dipping sauce for breadsticks.
• Sauce for omelets.
• Topping in burritos.

And this is entirely in addition to classic use as a salad dressing and vegetable dip.

Cheap ranch dressing is ripe to miss the boat on real food. It’s a food processor’s wet dream: take water, toss in some inexpensive ingredients and artificial flavors, some xanthan gum, and you’ve got truckloads of ranch which can be sold with soda profit margins.

One of the more popular grocery store ranch dressing products is brought to you by Hidden Valley.

Here’s what’s in Hidden Valley’s ranch dressing:

Vegetable oil, egg yolk, sugar, salt, buttermilk, spices, garlic, onion, vinegar, phosphoric acid, xanthan gum, modified food starch, MSG, artificial flavors, disodium phosphate, sorbic acid, calcium disodium EDTA, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate.

Reading through the list, you probably felt fairly positive moving through the first 10. After that, however, the ingredients take a steady decline in the additive/preservative realm.

Still, though, it’s not as bad as it could have been. They could be using high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar.

Expect the ingredients of other ranch dressings to be similar to Hidden Valley, like Kraft’s ranch dressing and any ranch dressing served in a chain restaurant.

Take flour torillas, for example. Your standard flour tortilla recipe goes something like this: Flour, baking powder, salt, water, and lard (or shortening).

But these have a tendency to expire quickly. Grocery stores are not able to stock a product that is not good after a few days. So most ready-to-eat flour tortillas you find will be loaded with less-than-great ingredients designed to extend their shelf life.

That brings me to a recent stop at a Gordon Food Service. GFS sells food and cafeteria products in bulk. I was there to pick up non-food items, but after spotting some flour tortillas on the shelf I could not help but stop to examine them.

I was expecting something pretty bad, but this ingredient list was beyond my imagination.

Bleached enriched wheat flour, water, soybean oil, hydrogenated vegetable oil with mono- and diglycerides added, sugar, baking powder, salt, vital wheat gluten, potato starch, calcium propionate, monoglycerides and critic acid to preserve freshness, glycerine, fumaric acid, sodium bicarbonate, dextrose, dough conditioner, cellulose gum, potassium sorbate, enzyme complex, and dough relaxer.

For the sake of my wrists, I chose not to re-type several parenthetical expansions on these ingredients, including the enriched wheat flour, dough conditioner, and dough relaxer.

These guys take food science to a whole new level by going absolutely nuts with the minor ingredients. Figuring out what you are eating from the list of ingredients is a major challenge; I doubt many people would recognize that they were consuming a “tortilla”.

All I can say is that these tortillas were promptly set back on the shelf after the photos were taken.

In this post we break down the ingredients in a popular convenience store lemonade and what exactly they are doing.

Ingredients found in the convenience store “lemonade”

• Water
• High fructose corn syrup
• Sugar
• Lemon juice (from concentrate)
• Citric acid
• Modified cornstarch
• Glycerol
• Ester of wood rosin
• Sodium hexametaphosphate
• Sodium benzoate
• Potassium sorbate
• EDTA
• Yellow #5

Source: Some website

High fructose corn syrup: Heavy subsidization of corn has left the United States with too much of it. To eat up the surplus, scientists have found ways to extract all kinds of products by processing the plant. HFCS is one of these products, and acts as a sweetener. It’s also dirt cheap (at least when corn prices are low) and American beverage producers have found all sorts of ways to include it.

Citric acid: Used for tartness and preservation.

Modified cornstarch: As the name implies, modified cornstarch is cornstarch that has been treated to change one or more of its properties. In the case of lemonade, modified cornstarch is probably acting as a thickener to give the juice some texture.

Glycerol: Glycerol is colorless, odorless, thick liquid found in many beverages and household products.

Ester of wood rosin: Found in many beverages, ester of wood rosin is used to re-create an authentic lemonade taste. It’s also suitable as a stabilizer or emulsifier, helping keep various ingredients together. Ester of wood rosin is somewhat natural in origin, typically being derived from the stumps of longleaf pine trees.

EDTA: An abbreviation for ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, EDTA usually accompanies sodium benzoate and light acid in beverages. Why? Without it, carcinogenic benzene will form.

Yellow #5: Also known as tartrazine, Yellow #5 is a colored dye that makes Minute Maid’s lemonade look somewhat like lemonade. Due to research findings on tartrazine, the United Kingdom is currently phasing its use out as well as related color dyes.