The click-bait-y title aside, what’s rather alarming in the article was this:
The bakery was also warned about products that were “prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby they may have become contaminated with filth, or whereby they may have been rendered injurious to heath.”
I’ve never purchased the granola in question but always liked their bread; hopefully they’ve taken steps to rectify the situation instead of just calling the FDA letter a Orwellian move.
I support the FDA on this one. When I read the ingredient list, I want to see ingredients, not marketing spin. They can put a slogan ‘made with love’ somewhere else on the packaging.
I didn’t know that this was a real word, but dictionary.com seems to think so. I would like to understand more about this part of the letter. Insanitary conditions is concerning.
Is this condition found in the glassed in kitchen, the cafe, the eating area? Mr. SMT really loves their French loaves, sliced, and I am not sure how this letter helps me decide if we should stop buying it for a while or not.
A quick reading seems to suggest there were some mixing of allergen-containing dough (diary and nuts), and failure to clean prep area/equipments/utensil/warehouse.
I get that all manner of things happen in a restaurant that I probably don’t want to know about, but flies/inserts around baked goods is honestly kinda too much for my sensibility…
I agree with the FDA in this. While I think it is very cute to list Love as your ingredient in the front or on a TV ads, please don’t play games in the real ingredient list. The problem is that if Nashoba Brook Bakery can do this, then why can’t other companies start doing this? Now we can have all kind of random craps in this list, lie: Love, Dream, Dignity, God, Jesus, US Constitution, …etc
Do we want a mockery of this?
Look either we believe we want a truthful and accurate ingredient list or not. If other companies are following the rule, then why can’t Nashoba Brook Bakery?
No. They should be told to change the list…thrn fined if they don’t comply…shutting them down for the label is a last resort
The hygiene issues are a car bigger concern…shutting them down for that is certainly not unreasonable.
The fAct that they are using the ingredient list as a publicity smokescreen to generate sympathy while they continue to run a dirty kitchen that has been cited in the past for violations is what really bothers me.
I agree. The cutesy stuff doesn’t matter, though it makes me less likely to buy their products. The hygiene issues matter big time, and I will no longer even consider their products.
I finally read the Bloomberg article. Personally, I applaud Nashoba for thumbing their nose at the FDA, which used to be a sham and now is even more so under Gottlieb. As a former cancer biologist involved in drug development, I think what is happening with the FDA is dreadful so for a small bakery to get called out for love as an ingredient just tells me that they’ve got their priorities all messed up. And as for the other violations, if you guys eat out at all in any restaurants, the violations are manifold and much worse. The FDA is just giving Nashoba a lot of shit for nothing in my point of view.
As somebody working also in drug discovery I couldn’t disagree more about your thoughts about the FDA. There are a lot of things which can be improved about the FDA and its processes (and I am also not too happy about Gottlieb but compared to many other parts of the current US government he is one of the “better” parts) but overall the FDA (and the EMA) has done many good things over the years with actually relatively little power and resources. And it is absolutely correct for them to go after this bakery.
The all-mighty FDA is a bureaucratic nightmare and has been for many many years. I’m now a medical writer and have to delve into their documents. My colleagues and I have shared many WTF laughs (but fears at the same time) over their “guidances.” So for them to go after small-fry like Nashoba is laughable.
As a medical writer you might see only a very small part of the whole process. After you have gone multiple times through the whole life cycle of drug discovery from target validation through clinical compounds and development (the most advanced compound currently in PhII) and have seen all aspects of their work as I said before the FDA is actually doing a pretty good job especially considering their financial limitation and limited power
