Juicy tale of sneaky pics

Campaign for honest labels leads to tricky business at Pacific Coffee

ESPIONAGE IS TOUGH. Sneaking into a place and snapping secret photos is harder than it looks. Particularly when you have a seated audience watching you. 

But I had to do it. My Mission Impossible was to enter a cafe in a mall and take pictures of the shelves. Okay, so it’s not quite on the same league as James Bond’s missions to save the world from evil tyrants, but one has to start somewhere.

And being even doing something mildly odd in a mall isn’t easy. All over the world I have been stopped by mall guards under Bylaw 32.6 section (a). This law, which seems to exist in every country, says: “All shopping malls will employ uniformed Neanderthals whose sole duty is to harass shoppers.”

I was once stopped by a mall guard because his shopping centre was in the background of my photo. “You don’t own the skyline,” I shouted. “It’s owned by We The People.” (Wacko? Me?)

What was this all about? Well, a reader complained last week that the Pacific Coffee chain had shelf labels indicating that their drinks were 100 percent fruit. But the drinks are actually a mixture of water, sugar and juice.

His complaint, recorded in this column, produced a long corporate response from the company (click to the column here and scroll down). The letter was printed in some media.

“We have not labeled our juices as 100 percent Mango nor 100 percent Kiwi, but ‘100 percent natural’,” wrote marketing director Eugenie Kan, in a letter twice the length of the original item. “At Pacific Coffee, we have the integrity to be truthful about our products.”

The reader, whom we shall refer to as Mr Chemist, was incensed.

“It’s simply not true,” he shrieked.

He demanded that I come straight away to his local branch of the coffee shop with a camera. I obeyed.

He refused to enter, convinced that he would be seen by surveillance cameras and whisked off to Guantanamo Bay under some secret rendition deal.

So I went in. I pretended to be one of those idiots who walk around staring at their mobile phone. (In other words, I was playing myself.)

As I did so, I snapped photos of the shelves with the camera-phone function. My audience of coffee drinkers didn’t blink, even when I fell over a chair.

My findings? The labels on the fruit juice shelf were exactly as Mr Chemist had told me.

They said: “100% cranberry & apple”.

“100% strawberry & passionfruit” and

“100% guava & lemon”.

 

I saw only one label with the word “natural”, and that came across as  MORE misleading, not less. (Would anyone reading this with a legal mind like to comment?)

Mr Chemist felt vindicated. He asked me to store the negatives in a bank vault.

“This is a camera phone,” I told him. “There are no negatives.”

This upset him until I promised to make multiple copies, put one set on the Internet, and send another to US President Barack Obama. (I also decided to send a set to the Pacific Coffee Co.)

Why Obama? “Because he is the least likely person in the world to be snatched off the street and sent to Guantanamo Bay,” he said.

I shook my head, saying: “Clearly, you don’t know Republicans.”

But one thing puzzled him. “How come Pacific Coffee’s own marketing director doesn’t know what the labels on the shelves say?” he asked.

“Let’s be charitable,” I said. “Maybe it’s an honest mistake. Or maybe she drinks at Starbucks.”

 

Technorati Tags: pacific coffee,misleading labels

Comments

[sabrina]

100% natural mango?

that's really more misleading! :D

[fardel]

MrJam

Jelly made of 100 % nut.

Contains traces of sarcastic acid
Open cover slowly to avoid bursts of laughter.
Do not serve to Politicians, medjahs, financers....

[Louise]

if it's 100% natural mango, shouldn't the drink have the mango skin and seed in the bottle?

what does Pacific Coffee take non-Chinese speaking people for?

[Ellen]

How on earth can they say that this is not misleading. Mr Chemist and Mr Jam deserve an apology. Not to mention the thousands of people like me who have bought these drinks thinking that "100 per cent natural mango" meant "100 per cent natural mango."
As one of those wise people, i think it was TS or Sej, said in an earlier comment, if its not real juice you have to legally say "mango drink" or "mango nectar" or something. if i was pacific coffee, i would change these labels immediately.

[sej]

I'm not a legal eagle, but putting on my a**lly retentive hat on, I'd have to suggest even though the labelling on the shelf might be incorrect/misleading, it's probably the label on the bottle itself which wins...

[Ellen]

Sej, I think what it says on the drink is irrelevant. The corporate executive from pacific coffee fired off a long letter printed in the newspapers saying that Mr Chem and mr Jam were wrong about the shelf labels. In fact they were right and they provide clear evidence of this. Apologise, pacifc coffee!

[Sham]

100% Natural mango??
Would there be a unnatural mango drink too? Made from synthetic mangoes??

[Steve O]

This is cheeky stuff. However, you'll never be a successful investigative journalist with a crap camera like that. The images are so fuzzy. Invest in a decent snapper, please.

[May]

Mr. Jam

Apart from the labels on the shelves, have u checked the ingredients of fruit juice marked on the bottles?
(LLB graduate with a bit sense of legal mind)

[lizt]

I cant wait to read the response from Pacific Coffee this time.

[TS]

It doesn't matter what the label on the bottle say, the sale starts at the shelf. If a shop have its own brand for sale, you would expect them to get the shelf labels right.
It might not be "legally" wrong, but morally they are on shaky ground and deserve all the negative attention they are getting.

[Steve O]

May, the guys did check the ingredients marked on the bottles, it says in the first column that they checked and the stuff listed on the bottle is made of water sugar and juice. I think there's no arguments over the labels on the bottle, it's the labels on the shelves that are blatantly misleading. lets face it most of us would read the shelf label and buy the product for ourselves or our kids thinking that it was real mango juice etc, i meanw what else could you think? after you've seen the shelf label and bought the drink, are you going to double check by reading the bottle as well? there's no excuse for having one story on the shelf label and a different one on the product. My bet is that the bottle label is true and the shelf one is untrue. They need to change the shelf ones.

[May]

i have checked the shelf labels in two Pacific Coffe shops in Central during lunch time and observed that 1 just shows the label marked "orange juice", "mango juice", etc... but the other shows as nury's article said.

TS & Steve O, thanks for sharing.

TS - yes, i agree that it is quite misleading but it might not be legally wrong.

Steve O - i personally dont rely on what the shelf said. i will double check the ingredients of the drink before payment.

Nury, i'm not going to take this matter to the court. BUT it is really an argument matter. May i share my opinions with u just for interesting discussion :-

1. No "pure" word is shown in the shelf label;
2. "orange juice" is really extracted from 100% natural oranges & "mango juice" also. u know what i mean? "100%" can mean everything; and
3. what about if u add some ices into your mango juice & then it melted into water, can u say it is not 100% mango juice?

my disputable opinions above are just for sharing & are not sponsored by Pacific Coffee!!

[sej]

Ellen,

Firstly, I do agree the labels on the shelf are in my opinion extremely misleading and inappropriate.

I think though, if you go back an re-read the letter, there was actually no mention of what was printed on the shelf, only what was printed on the bottle.

Although we as consumers would very much like it to be otherwise, I suspect you will find the label on the shelf doesn't actually carry much legal weight, even though the product is a brand (presumably) owned by the outlet.

Accordingly, in my view, the letter was not incorrect, but nor did it answer the original complaint.

I think we really need photos/scans of the labels on the bottle.

Lastly, I think May is correct. What is printed on the shelf is just vague enough it would be hard to prove any intent to mislead, even though it really is quite obvious.

Nury,

Did you double check your Qoo juice? What was the story there?

[Nury]

Letter just received from Pacific Coffee

Dear Nury,

We apologize to you, Mr. Chemist and our customers. This is an honest mistake as you so kindly put it.

Your initial letter had us checking our bottle labels for possible misconceptions and thorough checks with our supplier on the exact contents and ingredients of our juice products.

Sorry that all along I thought you and Mr Chemist were referring to the labels on the bottles of juice. That’s why I replied as such in my previous email.

We are revising our price labels on the shelves.

You will see the changes within 2 days. Apologies once again.

Eugenie

[Nury]

Thanks, Eugenie and the gang at Pacific Coffee for taking this complaint seriously and agreeing to make the changes. There are a huge number of branches in several countries so it's going to be a big job.

Thanks also to Mr Chem for doing us all a favour. The shelf labels really were very misleading and it's good that they are about to disappear.

Sej: I checked on the Qoo box and it's just as bad as we thought. Coca-Cola company, you are next in our sights!

Anyone who sees examples of corporate trickery, please tip us off.

[May]

Good to see Pacific Coffee to make changes

[sej]

Actually, I should just clarify my statement, I inadvertantly truncated it somewhat...

even though it really is quite obvious.

should have read

even though it really is quite obvious the label on the product does not match the label on the shelf.

That aside, it's good to hear they've admitted they made a mistake and they intend to fix it.

In the company's defence... here's a sign I saw on my recent trip to China...

[Samson]

Honest "mistake"
honestly, you guys are so naive.
do you really believe they "accidentally" labelled all their drinks as 100% juice and when someone points it out to them they resist and fight back at first and then when they talked to lawyers (I bet they talked to lawyers about this) they realize that theyve been caught and they have to change them.
Thousands of people bought 100 per cent juice not realizing that it wasn that at all, but never mind, it was all a "mistake," yeah, sure.
Mr Jam and gang, good work and all that but you guys will never be a corporate watchdog, you are way too naive/

[Christy]

Samson, I think Nury is just trying to be "polite"... saying that it's an honest mistake makes it better for both sides as it's less accusatory.

Besides, whatever they may say, the important thing is that WE know :)

[sej]

Nury, can you post pics of the Qoo product label(s)? Or email them to me?

[Nury]

Sej, your comments are so impressive -- how do you do all that stuff, the italics and indents and all that? I understand how you do the photos, but your comment above is like a whole feature article! Your pic is hilarious.

Christy, you are very wise beyond your years.

[sej]

Nury, simple.

I'm a genius!

Well, in my mind anyway :-)

Seriously though, it's pretty easy... I simply use multiple levels of html, and use some html in a way that maybe wasn't intended.

For instance, firstly, I can do lists, either bulleted or numbered with <ul> and <ol> and then prefixing each line item with <li>. The whole block needs to be finished off with the appropriate </ul> or </ol>. Using </li> at the end of each line item seems optional.

Through this, I noticed if you simply put text inside the <xl></xl> tags without using <li>, the text conveniently becomes indented without the bullets or numbering.

You can also put tags inside tags, so the following is <b><i>valid</i></b>. The key here is simply to make sure you close the tags in the reverse order you open them. You cannot have <tag1><tag2></tag1></tag2>.

After that, it's just being careful with the spacing. There are other things I've worked out that can't be done, because the posting engine used by the site strips stuff out, such as sizing and selection of fonts, but so far so good, I've been able to do most other things I've asked of it.

I'm also fortunately a reasonably fast typist (anywhere from 70 to 120 words a minute depending on the day), so typing all the codes aren't so time consuming for me as they would be for one or two finger typists.

[sej]

I also asked some of my Chinese friends about what the sign said in Chinese... They couldn't tell me.

[Vince A]

I would've just labeled them "Made from 100% juice" and thus be 100% correct and 100% sneaky at the same time.

sej, from the little Chinese I know, it looks like "Mango juice", "Strawberry juice", etc. I'd be interested to know why your Chinese friends could not tell (are they 100% Chinese?)

[sej]

Ahh Vince...

I was actually talking about the road sign... Apparently it means something along the lines of they're doing some testing on the road, but even that didn't seem to make sense when you're actually there.

[Vince A]

oh i see

[TS]

sej,
Love the picture of the sign, my theory is that they had an Aussie in charge of the sign division.

[fardel]

"I'd be interested to know why your Chinese friends could not tell "
It reminds me of an old tale:
The NASA was practicing moon landing in the desert in the USA.
An old Navajo shepherd was watching with his grandson.
he could not speak English and the Nasa guys did not speak his language, but they , somekind of how , managed to become friends.
The old man was curious and asked his grandson what they were doing.
When he understood ,he asked the astronauts if they could deliver a message to the people living on the Moon.
They took the message and asked every indian they met what the message meant .
No one who knew the language could tell
The astronauts delivered the message to the moon.
Years later , one of them asked a new recruit to translate it:
"Watch out , they come to take your land"

This chinese sign says " danger,dead end road:Non residents only"

[Bernard]

Cheerios for Nury and gang for pointing out the labels, and to Eugenie & Pacific Coffee for making changes so promptly. I'd always thought big corporations couldn't care less about customer comments, so this is good news for Pacific Coffee.

[farah]

wow great job guys.
well over here it's a whole different story since we do live on food that does not even have the basic raw material even though the brand name and the ingredient list says it does. fruit juices doesnt contain fruit, flour doesnt contain whole flour. and over the last year we have had plenty of forgery cases with labels and hygiene. but at the end of the day i think we all have grown immune to synthetic food products so much that we actually do get worried about consuming the real stuff.

[Vaibhav]

Just thought i'd mention this. Guantanamo Bay has been shut down by none other than Mr. Barack Obama himself. He probably was scared he might be sent there.

Good on you for making Pacific Coffee change the labels and admit their mistake (tongue so far in cheek it hurts)

[TS]

Barack Obama pledged to shut Guantanamo Bay down, but it's still going strong and he recently said that it might have to stay open for a while (not open in the sense that the prisoners can come and go as they please :-).

[erico]

The Chinese road sign literally says "Road Section of High Filled-Earth". Not sure if it means there are big piles of earth on the side of the road, or if the road is itself built on top of a very deep filled area (as in cut-and-fill of civil engineering term; cutting the dirt of high area and dumping it to low area to create a level surface).

[sej]

Erico, now you tell me what it literally means, I can see the proper meaning now. It's pretty much exactly that. "Stuffed" means filled. The earth has been "filled" to make a flat-ish road. You can tell from the background it was quite a mountainous area we were going through.

When we were at the Terracotta Warriors, the tour guide rattled stuff off for ten minutes. The wife translated the lot with three words. I was most impressed.