[Update: see Ocean Spray's response in the comments below.]

More Cranberry news today.

Here’s a dilemma for you. Let’s say you are the CEO of a successful food company that sells products both to consumers and to other food processors. And let’s assume you are being squeezed by your big corporate clients to lower the price of your product. What do you do? Do you stand by the quality of your product and take a hit on the bottom line? Or do you get the food scientists to whip up a cheaper, inferior version?

This is the story of sweetened dried cranberries (SDC), manufactured by Ocean Spray. The consumer product, Craisins, contains dried cranberries, sugar (lots), and sometimes a bit of oil. That’s the package we buy at the supermarket. However, when we buy products with cranberry, such as Nature Valley Fruit Bars and Pepperidge Farm Chewy Granola Cookies, the cranberries inside are different. They come from a new product by Ocean Spray, called “Choice”.

What you need to know:

The “Choice” product has 50% less cranberry (the expensive ingredient) and more of other stuff: sugar, edelberry juice, citric acid. Some say, it barely has any cranberry left.

Here’s what The National Consumers League (NCL), a watchdog organization, wrote to the FDA:

…the cranberry content is so small that Ocean Spray must add color in the form of elderberry juice concentrate and acidity in the form of citric acid to simulate the color and acidity of cranberries. These findings are consistent with Ocean Spray’s own claims that it uses 50 percent fewer cranberries to make “Choice” than the regular product. Ocean Spray’s marketing materials tout “Choice” as a low-cost SDC with the same taste, texture, appearance, and health benefits as other SDCs.

NCL argues that such products should not be called cranberries, because they barely contain any of the original fruit. After sending the “Choice” product to a lab, they also ask that the ingredient label (on bulk packages, we assume) be corrected to state sugar as the first ingredient, not cranberries.

If you’re wondering why some products are full of all strange sounding names and chemicals, this story exemplifies one of the many reasons – manufacturer cost reduction.

Two other well known examples are the use of high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar in soft drinks (HFCS is half the price of table sugar) and the invention of margarine as a low cost alternative to butter (at the behest of France’s Napoleon two hundred years ago).

What to do at the supermarket:

Go for products with ingredient lists that have real, understandable names. Not always the healthiest (i.e too much butter), but at least you know what you are putting in your mouth.

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If you’re like most people, this Thanksgiving you’ll be having cranberry sauce with your turkey and stuffing. But what is cranberry sauce anyway?

It’s actually more of a jam or jelly than a sauce. The tart acidic flavor of the berries is buried under an avalanche of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) in order to create this holiday classic.

We took a look inside the label of Ocean Spray’s Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce.

What you need to know:

The product has just 4 ingredients:

Cranberries, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Water

If the company had used just sugar instead of corn syrups, the list would have been even shorter and better.

Nutritionally there’s not much here, as the processing has taken away most of the fiber from the cranberries. A serving is a quarter cup, or four tablespoons. It contains 22 grams of sugar, or about five and a half teaspoons worth. Most of the 110 calories from this serving come from sugar. There are virtually no vitamins here, despite a high vitamin C content in raw cranberries (25% of the daily value).

If you think about it, a serving of cranberry sauce on the dinner plate is sort of cheating -  you’re having dessert before the main meal is even over.

In the past, and in some places to this day, the cranberry sauce is not as heavily sweetened. It adds a delightful twist to your stuffing and turkey without the empty sugar calories. Too bad Ocean Spray doesn’t have a less sweetened option.

What to do at the supermarket:

Unfortunately, all the big brand and store brand cranberry sauces are more or less the same. But if you want to make your own, less sweetened sauce, it couldn’t get any easier:

In a small pot, mix 4 cups of fresh or frozen cranberries with one cup of water and half a cup (or less) of sugar, bring to boil and then simmer until the cranberries “pop”. Cool. The sauce thickens as it cools. Best to prepare a day or two in advance.

You can also opt for an uncooked cranberry sauce. Here’s an interesting option from Maria Rodale.

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