In a formal complaint to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), NCL is urging the federal agency to stop the sale of four brands of ‘100%’ lemon juice that were recently tested and found to be heavily diluted with water. There were four products tested by NCL, each of which contain only a small amount of real lemon.
Consumer advocates believe that these producers water down their products to lower production costs and increases profits. In the case of lemon juice, recent weather conditions have led to variability in the supply of fresh lemons, and lemons being harder to get has given unscrupulous producers incentive to dilute their products with water and add citric acid and sugars to compensate for flavour.
The label of NaturaLemon (one of the products tested) indicates that the bottle contains the juice of 30 lemons. However, the bottle is likely made with only the juice from 10 lemons, according to NCL.
NCL said they hope that FDA or state officials will take action to ensure that these brands either clean up their act or are no longer sold in stores.
Source: NCL
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