Alcohol in pudding not clearly displayed

[Purpledefector]

I need a bit of a reality check - prefacing to say I'm 2.5 years sober - and not sure if this is clouding my judgement a bit.

I bought a dine in meal in Sainsbury's and the pudding was ' chocolate hazelnut pots' ' sponge biscuit layered with creamy chocolate hazelnut mascarpone and topped with hazelnuts and chocolate shavings'.

When I started to eat it I immediately noticed the very obvious taste of alcohol. Went and checked the packaging and listed within the ingredients was 'alcohol' but this wasn't mentioned or hinted at anywhere else on the product - in the picture or the describing words.

I was really surprised by this lack of transparency. Sainsbury's responded to my complaint really quickly - offered me a £10 gift card and said it would be fed back to the packaging department. I said that I felt that didn't reflect the seriousness of the issue and asked for it to be raised with a manager. It has been and their response is the same.

It's not sitting right with me, it feels like a huge error - and I want to take it further.

What's the general consensus?

The regulations around how food containing alcohol should be labelled is here https://www.businesscompanion.info/en/quick-guides/food-and-drink/alcoholic-beverages-spirits-and-food#Alcoholinfood

From that, Sainsburys have done nothing wrong. But if you don't agree with the labelling regulations, you need to take it up with your MP and not Sainsburys.

Getting a £10 voucher because you didn’t read the label properly doesn’t sound too terrible to me.

If you can't be bothered to check the ingredients because you want to avoid a particular one, eg alcohol, then make your own food. Simples.

What a load of drama over a product which contains alcohol having 'Contains Alcohol' written on the front.....

Agree. Those comments remind me of another thread where some posters implied two drags on a friend’s cigarette made OP a smoker and an addict.

Kind of fair enough when you've got to the point of emailing a company, getting a tenner, posting about how you can escalate it further on Mumsnet and still not actually checking to see if what you want is in fact already written, clearly, on the front of the pack.

Very much implying you had real problems and she didn't.

@kkloo this is a type of inference known as "making shit up" 🤣

There was no making stuff up 😂It's all there in your post.

I'm probably more irked by your post than I would otherwise be, because — as well as routinely checking ingredients lists for gluten and nutrition information for sugar — I've had to spend more time than I'd have liked, over the past few years, searching around for and downloading safety data sheets from the internet, cross-referencing them with bafflingly technical Wikipedia pages about chemistry, and trying to make inferences from incomplete data. I do this because I have a family member who reacts badly to a particular set of chemicals that are a common ingredient in toiletries and cleaning products. Unfortunately, cleaning products — even if they're ones that are very likely to get on your skin, like washing-up liquid or surface wipes — don't have to list their ingredients like toiletries do, so I need to do the legwork. I don't get it all nicely presented to me on the back of the packaging, let alone emphasized on the front.

And you're here complaining about not getting an abject enough apology or a big enough compo voucher when you complained that there was a small amount of alcohol in a luxury pudding of a type which commonly contains alcohol. Alcohol which you have already conceded did not, in fact, have any negative psychological impact on you, and which was not only listed in the ingredients for you, but warned about directly above the info panel on the front of the box.

I'll think of you next time I'm hunting around online trying to find a safety data sheet to investigate whether using a particular cleaning product on the bath will turn my family member's skin into a scabby mess.

Some puddings are not cooked

Slightly of topic but I added these to my shopping and they are fairly good.

NoBinturongsHereMate PuddlesPityParty PinkLemonade3

Something like this I would check the ingredients particularly because a lot of chocolate desserts contain meat products and dairy

However I do know many people who are not vegan or vegetarian and don’t have allergies who just pop something like this in their basket without paying much attention to what is in the product

They're on my list for today!!!

It's definitely not clear and anyone with sight problems wouldn't be able to see the tiny writing.

If I read the description of the product, I would think that it would be a nice posh dessert for my young children. This is why it is misleading. It should be in the description of the pudding to make it clear, not in micro letters elsewhere on the packaging.

Sainsbury are probably wondering why there’s an upsurge in the sale of these, or views on their website!

Of course you do. People with no.specific dietary requirement don't need to read the lable. This is not a surprise.

Anyone who does have specific requirements has to read the information given. It's all there.

What do you expect supermarkets to do? Employ a member of staff to follow every shopper around saying 'Do you know what's in that?' every time they pick up a product?

Is this the product in question?
It says Contains Alcohol clearly on the front of the box 🫤
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-chocolate-hazelnut-pots-taste-the-difference-2x95g

Wow. Thank goodness you turned up!

Is it clear though? It took me looking at the packaging 4-5 times to see it. 2-3 of those times I knew it was on the front and wanted to see it from myself.

It's clear in the sense that it's written in plain language on it twice, but it's not clear in the sense that some people aren't very good at looking for things.

I looked a number of times before I saw it written in plain sight.

It’s clear that that op has run off .

Bold is used to highlight key allergens.
Alcohol doesn't meet that criteria.

It does say that it contains alcohol, quite clearly, on the front of the packaging - this is in addition to it being in the ingredients list.

If people bother to read the op updates they will see that she admitted she didn't bother to read the label properly and it was on the front.

Maybe you need to go to the opticians then.

Is it clear though?

I think it is clear.
It's on the front and written in clear font, and is not particularly small font.

I saw it on the first opening of the image.

But yet loads of people missed it which shows that it's not that clear.

And for some here who have said it was clear they are looking at the packaging specifically to look for the wording.....if they were in the supermarket buying it themselves at least some of them would definitely have missed it.

And then we have people here who went looking for it, so they knew it was on the box and it still took a while to spot it.

So that would show that it's not actually clear, especially when there's no mention of alcohol in the name of the product, or in the description of the product....or in the second description of the product which is on the Sainsburys website and is presumably elsewhere on the packaging but they don't show it on the website.

It was a very badly labelled/described product in general.

I don't like alcohol in desserts but let's say I did and spotted the contains alcohol wording and was happy to buy the product, I then would have been disgusted to find that it had a coffee flavour also because that was written nowhere on the front of the packaging.

Alcohol and coffee and strong flavours in dessert so I expect it to be more immediately obvious what the flavour of the dessert is.

They're also flavours that if you are not a fan of will completely overpower the dessert and ruin it so the description should have been far more clear.

And if someone was to buy the product on their website they are unlikely to zoom in and look at the entire picture looking for anything about alcohol and there is zero mention of alcohol at all except in the ingredients list.

Also in the same range there's a tiramisu which was probably likely to be very close to it or even next to it on the shelf as there's only 5 desserts in the range that I can see

They have
strawberry and cream meringue kisses
Lime cheesecake slices
Sticky toffee pudding
Amaretto Tiramusu
Chocolate hazelnut pots

The chocolate hazelnut pot description on the front of the pack says
Sponge biscuit, layered with creamy chocolate hazelnut mascarpone and topped with chopped hazelnuts and chocolate shavings

I wouldn't be checking that further to see if it contained alcohol or coffee because I would assume it didn't...seeing as it didn't say so in the description and also because it was likely beside the tiramisu, why would they have 2 similar flavor desserts in such a small collection, but misrepresent the flavour of one of them? weird

It's definitely not clear. Everything should be considered, not just the fact that the wording is on the packet.