pureKRAP

In the world of salad dressings, there is big movement. When a Big Food company like Kraft changes their product offerings, it shows that the consumer is making tougher choices, and is making those choices based on the current health craze or fad. Marketing is up - billboards, tv spots, and web banners.

Kraft has introduced a new line of pureKRAFT food offerings. (link to their actual site to see what I'm talking about)

Immediately, the flash presentation begins with :

eureka - pureeka

NO artificial preservatives.

REAL ingredients.

50 fresh new flavor offerings.

Golly, where do I start?

How about first, the idea that a Big Food company had to start over, from scratch, to create a product that seems like it was made from scratch. The three main flash pages are nice, but they each reveal that before this line Kraft dressings were full of preservatives, had no real ingredients, and had a small collection of flavors? While this all may be true, the company is known for cheese and dressings and cookies... Velveeta, Catalina, and Oreos (among other items acquired from various leveraged buyouts) ...and all their items seem to have a glorious half life of 50 years. Granted, they took out the saturated fats in Oreos not too long ago - and Kraft is pretty quick to jump on the diet fads. They're not in it for your health, mind you, it's to get you to put their product in your shopping cart.

Real Ingredients - they show olive oil, basil leaves, raspberries, grape tomatoes... yum. Uh, why not just PUT those things on your salad? I mean, if you're really concerned about the stuff you're eating - why not just add those items to your iceburg lettuce yourself, rather than buying a mayonnaise bonded goo on your greens? And if it's real ingredients now, what the hell have they been putting in there before? A concentration of activators and ribozymes flavored to mimic a carrot? Yep.

50 fresh flavors - That's a lot of product. And they're all PURE. They're really playing up the word PURE before other words... what's that called? I mean other than lame? I'll just call it wordPLAY. Wow, I just came up with that -- PUREgenius. See. Lame.

And I have to bring up the whole definition of what 'pure' is. Are we talking - pure gold - ie mixed with not other matter? Well, that can't be it, because salad dressing IS a junk mixed together. How about ritually clean, like a virgin of pure blood? Oh, well, perhaps they're alluding to free from what vitiates, weakens, or pollutes? But what is 'pure' about salad dressing in the first place? Oil and vinegar aside - what is pure, or even natural about salad dressing? It sure isn't 'natural'. The word implies organic - healthy - natural, but it is not actually any of those.

They may have taken out the artificial preservatives, but have they taken out the artificial flavoring and artificial coloring? Well, that's the best part! No. These new pure dressings contain High Fructose Corn Syrup... which, if you've been reading any of this -- you know doesn't exist in nature. Is created by centrifuge in an enzymatic industrial process then mixed with 'pure' corn syrup to reach its final form - which is an industrial substitute for sugar. Uh, I'm not a scientist - pretty sure that fails my definition of PURE. How about yours?

Is that false advertising, or just successful implied advertising?