Vine-Ripened Cherry Tomatoes

Tom Beatty posted this snapshot of a carton of "vine-ripened" cherry tomatoes to Facebook. In case you're viewing a text-only feed or have red-green colorblindness: the tomatoes are not at all ripe, and some of them are very green. Aside of the irony of the image, it strikes me as an excellent example of bad product labeling.

Consumers have become thoroughly jaded to product packaging. Thus far, neither Tom nor anyone who's commented on the photo has expressed any outrage at the obvious attempt to misinform the customer. It's laughable, but does not offend - and the lack of offense stems from a lack of faith in marketing claims - because to be offended and the "deception" would require that one had an expectation of honesty.

There was a time when something like this would have rankled, and when consumer-protection groups would have sought out the producer to set things right. But in the present age, the consumer watchdogs are asleep - moreover, if a person is misled by advertising, the reaction tends to be "what a naive person" rather than "what an unethical company."

At the risk of coming off as cynical, I tend to wonder if consumer protection groups ever gave much thought to protecting the consumer, or if they were merely pawns of the manufacturers who funded them. In this instance, it would seem that Andrew & Williamson (the importer who packaged these particular tomatoes) could be subject to a lawsuit from Desert Glory, the company that spent quite a lot of advertising money to run television commercials for its "Nature Sweet" tomatoes and establish a public perception that vine-ripening produces a tastier tomato.

My guess is that Desert Glory doesn't consider Andrew & Williamson a serious enough threat to their brand to invest in pursuing the matter, or hasn't contributed quite enough support to the consumer protection racket to get them to take up a public relations campaign, or fear that any publicity might do more damage to the public perception of "vine ripened" and undermine the perception they have paid to create.

But I digress ... the point I had intended to make was that advertising claims about products by those with a commercial interest in selling them have lost credibility with consumers, and my sense is that this image and the reaction that precipitated (or the lack of reaction) is an excellent demonstration of that.

On closer inspection, the same label contains a few phrases that have also lost their meaning: the banner across the top reads "limited edition", and just below it, there's the word "Premium" - both of which have been used so frequently in advertising that they have lost all meaning to consumers.

In all, there's virtually no value in any of the words on this label. From top to bottom, it indicates:

• Limited Edition - A completely meaningless phrase
• Premium - Also completely meaningless
• Vine-Ripened - Which is plainly false
• Cherry Tomatoes - Which is self-evident, as the package is clear
• Do Not Refrigerate - Good advice for the consumer's storage to preserve quality (though I wonder if there is much "quality" to preserve)
• Andrew & Williamson, San Diego, CA - A company, but their role is unclear: did they grow them, package them, wholesale them, or merely provide the branding?
• Net weight 12 ounces - Perhaps the only words on the entire label that can be trusted, or are of any use to anyone
• Product of Mexico - Not on the label, but a sticker which would seem to indicate that the address of the company above may be in the U.S., but the product was actually grown in another country.

There is nothing that a consumer would take into account when purchasing the item, which begs the question: why bother to label this item at all? Arguably, putting a certain quantity into a package is a convenience to the consumer in that it enables them to grab-and-go rather than to have to bag and weigh the produce if it were stored in a bulk bin - and while the price isn't shown in this image, my experience with other produce is that the convenience comes at a considerable mark-up.


I've rambled on a while, and there's probably quite a bit more that doesn't immediately come to mind - all related to a general theme of the value of marketing efforts to communicate the qualities of a product to the customer by means of product labeling, and all pointing to the general conclusion that, for some products, there's simply no point to doing so.