Why is this a problem? I assume you mean rolled oats not horse feed (or steel cut oats which are 4 times the price) in which case they are all desiccated.
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Tanya we often confuse what is the " real " world with the a consumer induced Utopia that will never exist . For arguments sake let us say that we are major share holders in Mick & Tanya’s Food Co . You are the chairman of the Board and I’m your CEO in charge of marketing .
For the sake of our argument we import and repackage tea . You decide as a responsible retailer to have me , your Marketing Ceo , have printed on the Tea packet that the tea has been irradiated and the caffeine has been reduced by the chemical ethyl acetate method . I ask you our share of the market . You tell me 43% . I tell you that if we print that on our packaging we will have less than 5% of the market in 2 months .
Tanya the real world is about competition , dollars and cents and getting a leg up on your opposition . If we print what you had wanted on our tea packets and our competitors do not , think about the consequences to our company regarding sales .
You are thinking the government , state or federal , could legislate it to make it law to publish the above procedures the tea has undergone… They wont . Check the log jam of consumer related bills in our senates . Eventually they give up trying to pass them and they end up in the "too hard " basket . ( That’s where we come in as members of the Choice.Community forum . To prod , to poke and try and act as a conscience that the government cannot ignore .)
Keep posting Tanya and prove me wrong . Maybe one day social conscience will rule over the mighty corporate dollar and all it embellishes . I really , really hope so.
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It would be great to have assurance of honesty and complete details on every product. Short of this Utopia, it would be useful for fresh fruit and veges to simply show who the grower was, where that grower is located and the date the produce was picked. That too seems too much for many.
For now we can choose to go to the local fruit and vegetable store in our rural district. The owner buys mainly locally, and sells what is in season. You only need to ask and you will get all the answers you could want. If it’s organically certified it is also clear.
For processed products it is obviously more complex.
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I do not expect any honesty from any company. It is why I am saying the law should be introduced by force. Concealing the vital information to help a consumer to make an informed choice is unacceptable in a free and democratic society. Or are you saying we live in a totalitarian one, where the mighty dollar overrules people’ health and well being?
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I was talking about spraying Glyphosate or other drying agents on crops before harvesting.
Under our present system of government until the powers of the upper house are reviewed which will be always blocked by the upper house I would say yes it is verging on a totalitarian society.
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I don’t understand, glyphosate is a herbicide what has that got to do with drying crops before harvesting?
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One only need look at the outcome for free range egg labeling to see how the system can be gamed. You need a better packaging expert 
‘Free Range’ chook density has to be shown on the package, but many suppliers obfuscate their claims (eg under 10,000) through integration with art work making one need to actively seek it out, sometimes for minutes prior to being able to focus on it. Some have the <10,000 density embedded on a green ‘badge’ symbol that makes it look like ‘gree’ as well as a certification; those that are <1500 generally have it in clear prominent text as intended. Both meet the legal requirement. How hard would it have been to define exactly how and where the density declaration had to be done for consistency? The answer was obviously too hard under duress from commercial egg industry lobbying.
Gaming the system with or without governmental collusion is a time honoured commercial endeavour. If the text the tea has been irradiated and the caffeine has been reduced by the chemical ethyl acetate method became legally required on all packaging, under business duress I could see it transforming into something like ‘process 172’ to protect business profits.
Some E951 in your coffee, sir? Or how many look for an absence of E320? The blessed obfuscation masquerading as simplicity is what it is. What we don’t know might hurt us, but businesses can prosper anyway. Let the economy roll since we can always trust producers (and banks) to do the right thing even when they don’t. And enough of us vote to sustain that ideology within the baskets of policies of each party that turns us on or off, so here we are.
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Counterpoint is that the upper houses have stopped some seriously bad laws from time to time. They can be obstructive but are intended to temper excesses of the lower houses (eg government).
One of the federal MPs was quoted something like ‘we won the election, we have the numbers, we can do what we want.’ We do not have the right of recall and do not have the ability to reign in a run-away government so I for one find that frightening and indicative of what could happen if there was literally a governments’ ability to operate open slather, no checks or balances involved.
There are valid arguments on both sides, one being an elected government should be able to govern, but do you trust banks or pollies more, if that makes a point. I for one like some ‘obstruction’ to keep them as honest as possible.
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It is a practice for non-organic farmers to spray wheat crops with Glyphosate just before harvest in order to speed the drying off of leafy matter, and bring the whole crop to the same level of readiness for havest.
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Perhaps Choice has part of the solution in it’s own future in this instance?
Is it possible that we can take the missing information out of the hands of the retailers and suppliers and manufacturers?
What’s in this product App?
An app that scans the product bar code which is already an agreed unique and universal identifier.
An App that is only available to Choice subscribers or membership.
An App that can collect pricing information every time a user scans a product.
An App that returns alternate current pricing to let you know the best deal it is aware of.
An App that for selected items returns added information about the product, eg who owns the brand, maybe where it is made, useful consumer information, and hopefully added information such as that discussed previously by @Tanya.
You would hope this would get some support from individual suppliers that see the benefit of brand awareness. Broader industry tried in a limited way to do something similar with QR codes although these were a bit like the Apple Newton. Ahead of their time due to limited access to mobile data for low cost. The large shopping centres offer free wifi internet in return for you creating a unique user ID. This obviously has a purpose aligned to the shopping centre.
The challenge is who will be the first to turn this concept into a working solution, the self aware constant AI companion and trip advisor of the retail shopping world? Privacy concerned need not apply!
And realistically, would a paid for use or government funded product ever be able to develop grow and survive against the Google model of paid commercial support in return for the data heart and sole of the user?
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Choice has already dared go there, albeit in a specific case and limited manner. Familiar with it?
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Yes, thank you @PhilT 
It seemed so obvious I neglected to give Choice a star.
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Cunningly our local butcher, fruit shop etc all have local branded boxes of eggs from producers who often have zero web presence.
CluckAR works fine in the supermarket. However there is a downside when shopping locally. You need to put your trust in the local business, or send a drone over the hill to spy on the chooks. At least one of the suppliers used by IGA appears to self certify free range.
The CluckAR Ap has a tight scope, and motivated users, from which it must benefit. Faceplant, quacking, and lookatmemum all started from humble beginnings to be a tool of the masses. Their rise to fame came through commercialisation of the IP to deliver benefits to third parties. It would be great to think Choice had the resources to expand on CluckAR, however if it ever caught on commercially would it become a race to the bottom backed by Google? Something Choice would never do.
p.s. I think I meant to say - Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All of which I do not use. For everything else there is email to which you can attach a confidentiality disclaimer just in case it goes astray.
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What are your explicit issues with these methods and justification for why they should be labelled?
I have come to understand a lot of visitors do not know what Choice does beyond product reviews (and some might not even know that) nor do they know about the .community, they arrive from google clicks. That is why Choice made the top banner so large. Thus what is obvious to we ‘locals’ could be a surprise to visitors.
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Fruit & vegetables doesn’t get much fresher than this.
Great stuff.
Well, the secret is out, and suspect I’ll need to queue next time I need fresh fruit.
It would be an interesting Choice members project to build a list of similar minded businesses and their locations. Steve Irwin Way, between Glass House and Beerwah Qld if you were wondering. It’s not the only place we shop for F&V, but a good choice for seasonal products or certified organic if that is what you seek.
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Is that where if you are shy they extract you from your refuge, wrestle you to the ground and then hold you up in the bright light of a movie camera before releasing you with a chuckle?
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Indeed it would - and it should be mandatory methinks. Used to be that if you bought fruit/veg in season it was fresh. Now the question is, which season? Spring this year or last? Am tiring of brown-fleshed apples (one had a germinated seed inside). It’s claimed that there is little nutritional difference between cold-stored and fresh (although I have my doubts) however there’s a world of difference in taste and, once released from the cold, the fruit deteriorates very quickly.
I only have a small supermarket here (Foodland) and they promote their produce as ‘farm fresh’, ‘market fresh’ and, my favourite, ‘picked fresh’. I’d like to know when they were picked and I think, at the very least, I should have a choice between fresh from the tree and fresh from the fridge.
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I’d also prefer to know the date produce was picked, and from which district or farm.
The sale of product that is out of season from storage is common. Agree we should know if the product has been in storage and for how long.
Home truths?
Is picked ripe and direct to store counter best?
It’s not always that simple. It can also depend on which fruit or vegetable we are discussing. Some exceptions include tomatoes, bananas, and avocado. All of these stop drawing from the plant before they commence ripening (rot). They are usually picked unripened. There is also a long list of fruits which we deliberately as needed pick and use green (EG paw paw, mango, coconut).
It makes zero difference to taste whether a tomato is vine ripened or set aside in the fruit bowl for a few days. Assumes it has not been in storage.
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