Inside knowledge from the food industry!

Hi,

I've been working in the food industry for a few years now and I also have a type 1 diabetic husband, a type 2 diabetic father and 2 type 2 diabetic uncles!
I've always thought that you should use every bit of information you gain at work to your advantage. And as so many people in my life have this terrible disease I've tried over the years to pass on my knowledge of good nutrition as well as the horrors of food manufacturing.

Basically, my advise in a nut shell is buy fresh unprocessed meat, fresh unprocessed fruit and veg and make your own sauces and flavour your food with your own freshly prepared ingredients.

One particular horror I've come across whilst working for various factories is something known as "rework". All factories carry this out to some extent of another. Basically, if a tomato ketchup is made in the factory and for example the starch isn't activated and it does thicken, the factory will then try to rework it back into another batch of ketchup increasing the amount of starch. This is my view is okay, whats not okay is when the ketchup is reworked into for example, a tikka sauce, a BBQ sauce and so on. This is completely legal, the nutritional information about the reworked product does not have to be declared on the back of pack and in a nut shell the consumer has no idea what they are eating. So a diabetic could be about to tuck into a pasta sauce which says "tomato and Basil" on the jar with 15g carbohydrate and it could contain a tomato saesoning from crisps which is 50% sugar!! Need i go on?! Again this is totally legal and each individual factory and manufacturer does this to various degrees. Thankfully I work for a company which does not take part in this but I used to work for another which employed someone to rework unthickened sauces, unsold seasoning etc into fresh products.

I could go on with horror stories but to be honest the best advise I could give to a diabetic or those without it, is don't trust what it says on the jar or pack becasue they are never accurate.
We also do pack changes well in advance or well behind changes to the ingredients in the packet so like I said they are rarely up to date!

Make everything fresh, its time consuming but worth it!!

Nic.

Hi Dennis

I don't know of a manufacturer making sauces deliberately, as this would be costly. The reason for rework is to use up ingredients already paid for that would otherwise have to be disposed of. You take sauce A which went wrong somehow in the factory, then add it to sauce B at different percentages. If you can't smell, taste or see sauce A in sauce B then it goes ahead and into the shops.

One thing I would say about added sugar in processed food is that it is used extensively, even more than you would imagine. Firstly, we use dextrose, glusoce, maltose, maltodextrin etc and other types of sugar as "fillers". An example is with crisp flavours. All recipes equal 100%, therefore if I develop a crisp seasoning and within it are certain flavours which are particularly strong I would use a filler to reduce the strenght of them before its applied to the crisps. Its the same with sauces. If you are to be filling a 400g jar, the sauce recipe must equal 400g, therefore dextrose is used as a filler.

The other major use of dextrose and glucose in food is in a process called "agglomeration". Examples of this are in coffee granules, gravy granules, oxo cubes etc, basically anything that needs to be disolved really quickly and not form lumps. A seasoning, say for a gravy is made, and then transfered into a huge vessel where masses of dextrose are blown in and the result is a gravy granule which dissolves instantly. Here though the sugar content has to be declared, so don't all stop drinking instant coffee, just know that filtered coffee which has to go into a caffeteire (sp?) will probably be pure coffee without having gone through the agglomeration process.

I was shocked and appalled when I discovered this fact, yes its declared on pack which is good but as a nation we eat far too much of this "hidden sugar", all of which is wheat derived thus increasing wheat intolerances as well as diabetes!!

I wish I could stop this but the industry is built on these rules. I have to say my products don't contain sugar as a filler I make sure of it!!

As a rule of thumb, read the lables on all products you buy, don't buy anything that is described as "sweet" becasue there are legal requirements that say it must conform to a certain level of sweetness and eat fresh ingredients (theres no added sugar in carrots)!!
Nic.