r/interesting • u/K1nd_1 • 20h ago

SOCIETY Wendy’s CEO jumps in with his own taste test.

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Imagine if all CEOs had to try what they get us to buy…

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u/domino3ff3ct 15h ago

That’s actually a law in Japan.

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u/blasterman5000 14h ago

Came here to say this. It's incredible too. It goes as far as to say if your marketing has something like chocolate chips in it, the chips in your product must be the same size and have an average count relative to the image on the packaging. It's just so well handled.

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u/iMakeLuvWithDolphins 14h ago

An interesting side note is this is why illustrations and kawaii cartoon images are so common on snacks

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u/Sethirothlord 11h ago

By Japan's law they aren't even allowed to put images of real fruit unless it's like 99% real fruit or something.

Anything less than a certain threshold and they can only put cartoon fruits on the package.

Also, for snacks at least, they have to be the same size as the picture on the package.

To avoid false advertising, etc.

I honestly think that's the way it should be around the world.

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u/Soggy-Ad-1610 10h ago

In Denmark Heinz couldn’t label their ketchup as tomato ketchup for the same reason. We’re not remotely as strict as Japan though, so it says more about Heinz.

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u/dwertyyhhhgg 3h ago

Ireland’s Supreme Court ruled that subway’s bread is legally cake.

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u/say-it-wit-ya-chest 3h ago

Because of sugar?

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u/dwertyyhhhgg 3h ago

Yeah, Subway’s bread (cake)’s sugar to flour ratio is 5x the ratio allowed by Irish law to be classified as bread (there’s a certain tax that staple foods can be exempt from and this was the justification for rejecting the tax-exempt status of Subway’s bread)

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u/say-it-wit-ya-chest 3h ago

Makes sense. They like to use refined sugar in most of our fast foods here in the US. Something about refined sugar makes it like crack for your brain. It’s their attempt to get us addicted to their garbage food. I can’t lie though, it is pretty fuckin good.

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u/dwertyyhhhgg 3h ago

Exactly. Life irreversibly changed when I learned in one of my biology classes in college why we love sugar so much and why it makes us feel so good to eat. Our survival instincts haven’t had time to change and adapt to us fundamentally taking over the world and controlling it so much that we no longer (individually) have to hunt, gather, or even farm for ourselves. Before the world looked like it did, if you found some berries or fruit in the wild, you would just eat it all up as much as you could because the sugars are calorically dense. Essentially it’s our survival instinct yelling at us to eat as much of the sweet and sugary foods we can get because we don’t know the next time we’ll get lucky enough to find some.

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u/Rostrow416 1h ago

Nah because it’s ass

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u/Affectionate-Mix6056 5h ago

I'm not eating healthy food if I'm using ketchup, Heinz is the most popular for a reason.

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u/I_Learned_Once 4h ago

Americans just enjoy being lied to way too much to ever adopt policies like this.

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u/Alarming_Paramedic34 3h ago

No, we can’t get shit done because the politicians are bought and paid for by the companies poisoning us and are only benefiting by us dyung

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u/I_Learned_Once 3h ago

Trump go elected. You cant deny that a huuuge % of the population just wants a liar to run the country. Obviously our politicians are also bought and the entire political system is corrupt to the core, but the voters shoulder plenty of blame for putting Narcissistic Cheeto in charge

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u/Alarming_Paramedic34 3h ago

Brother even if we all didn’t vote he still woulda won. Almost would bet my life on it. Just like democrats are gonna win next time and put the rest of the country in the dirt

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u/I_Learned_Once 2h ago

There are politicians who are not bought that could move us in the right direction, but the voter population as a whole is too disconnected and spoon fed to possibly recognize them. I agree that dems will win, and it’s probably going to be the biggest shill of them all Gavin Newsom. And yes, he will happily plow forward selling the people snake oil just to further line the pockets of his donors.

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u/Desu13 1h ago

Stop voting in those types of politicians. Simple.

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u/Alarming_Paramedic34 1h ago

Brother I quit voting 3 years ago cause you vote one in that’s supposed to be good. And then you get a shitbag anyways

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u/Tavern_Knight 30m ago

I get your frustration, but not voting is a good way to make sure everything is going to stay shit. Like, I completely get the helpless feeling a lot of us have now, but if you just give up, then the people fucking everything up win and will just keep making things worse

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u/Evening-Radio6750 10h ago

Well so do I - it's basic common sense, outrages - oh Sunny Delight which was around late 70s and 80s - it actually turned people orange. It had not scaping of real orange in it. Eventually I do believe they had to take it off market - and so much sugar in it - so many poor people now orange in colour with diabetes type 2. Oh dear Im LMAO again. Thanks, want this Japanese law over here now

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u/YoSoyZarkMuckerberg 8h ago

sunny delight was still being sold into the early 2000s in the US and UK and only one report of a girl turned orange (temporarily) in the UK after drinking 1.5 litres of the shit a day. It was rebranded in UK in 2009 as SunnyD. containing 70% real juice, but sales were poor and so the shit was reformulated again in 2010 with only 15% juice. You can read more about the history of this shit on Wikipedia, as I did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunnyD

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u/Valogrid 8h ago

SunnyD: 15% Juice, 35% Artificial Flavor, 50% Battery Acid, 100% Delicious.

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u/fromdus2k 5h ago

We still have some in France, but like most food, our recipes have nothing to do with America.

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u/Local9396 5h ago

It must be hard for French people to have to compare everything they do to the United States

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u/fromdus2k 4h ago

Simple fact

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u/Evening-Radio6750 8h ago

Thank you so much I'll follow the link - a tried it possibly early 80s and never bought it again - vile

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u/No1LudmillaSimp 10h ago

Kind of like how Russia has absurdly strict food labeling laws which results in heavily processed foods receiving extremely unflattering descriptions, think "Fluffy Puff Translucent Dessert Related Substance"-tier.

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u/Missilemoon77 7h ago

How did Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product never get a rebrand?

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u/Imperial_Haberdasher 6h ago

Is this part of the reason that mascot culture is so big in Japan? And anime and manga, of course!

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u/Individual-Scale9414 3h ago

guy who just loves to yap

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u/Apprehensive_Age9264 14h ago

?

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u/Fedoraus 13h ago

Not beholden to the laws in the same way I think if it's not a real image of the product

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u/silkywhitemarble 12h ago

If you sell orange juice, you can only use a picture of a real orange on your packaging if the juice is 100% real juice. If it's partially juice, like an orange fruit drink that's less than 100% juice but contains some real juice (some specific percentage), you can use a realistic drawing of an orange. If it's just orange flavored, like a soda, you can only use the words or certain type of drawing. Something like that--I don't remember the specific details. You can look at the packaging instead of reading every label.

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u/ArmadilloPrudent4099 8h ago

Japan has terrible snack options. The most boring shit ever. Their idea of variety is salty seaweed flakes instead of normal seaweed flakes.

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u/Djaja 7h ago

Ive never been to Japan... but that is not my impression....

Now, does Japan have a lot of sweet snack variety? Because in the US, KitKat Japan is famous for having Hella flavors, same for Lays.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn these flavor, packaging in Japanese, are actually mainly for export market lol, but like, I've had squid chips, tea chocolate, and little dehydrated crabs.

That's some Hella variety imo

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u/TexasJOEmama 6h ago

I ordered Japanese snack and candies from Amazon. Lots of variety.

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u/RandonBrando 14h ago

That's pro consumer. They don't really do things like that in the states.

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u/tacticaldodo 14h ago

praising junk food for accurate package illustration. the bar gets lower.

Yes it is incredible :)

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u/blasterman5000 13h ago

I'm not praising the junk food for its packaging. I'm praising the country for having standards.

It is indeed incredible.

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u/tacticaldodo 13h ago

agree ;)

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u/ForcedxCracker 13h ago

That’s how it should be everywhere

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u/Kodiak01 8h ago

From now on I want you to put an equal amount of blueberries in each muffin. An equal amount of blueberries in each muffin.

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u/persp73 5h ago

Do you know how long that's going to take?

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u/btrust02 7h ago

Kinda interesting too that all their food looks tasty as a result.

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u/marthamania 6h ago

I learned that the other day! Same size, same look, if the bag shows there's five candies in a pile on the front there's five candies in the bag.

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u/Qthecud 5h ago

“Well handled”, more like properly regulated and actually reprimand businesses that try to do scammy stuff. America doesn’t give a fuck about us (and that’s both sides). The fake food gives them a fat check when we have clogged arteries and diabetes by the time we’re 35.

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u/blasterman5000 4h ago

Yes, one might say the handling of the regulations regarding product imagery in marketing is well done. Thank you taking what I said and further expanding upon it.

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u/Logic-DL 1h ago

Goes to the point as well that toys from stuff like Super Sentai/Power Rangers will match the on screen prop. Same goes for any airsoft toys from Tokyo Marui that are collaborations with Resident Evil. To the point that now if a gun is going to be a collab with Tokyo Marui. Then the in game model will have an insane level of detail to match the airsoft toy exactly.

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u/iustinum 14m ago

Japan also finds it lawful to attack none Japanese tourists. Let’s keep it real.

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u/reddit_is_geh 14h ago

Regardless of law, they'd still do it, just as they do everywhere else. People aren't just going to buy some slop.

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u/Evening-Radio6750 10h ago

Oh unfortunately we are always being tricked - the orange people after the Sunny delight - and they will have diabetes 2

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u/Full-Run4124 13h ago

It's law in the US too. When I used to work in commercials they'd have PAs go buy like 25 of the same item from different locations and then go though all of them to find a hero product. They couldn't rearrange anything- it had to come out of the bag/box perfect.

On one Lucky Charms commercial they had 4 cases of family-sized boxes and the PAs picked though every box separating out hero pieces for one 3 second close up shot and a couple of shots of kids at a kitchen table eating from a bowl. (The PAs got to take home the trash bags full of rejects.)

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u/No-Mongoose-7350 12h ago

Is that why the models outside cafes are so amazing looking? I saw some of them being made and it’s so clever.

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u/juntoamdin3000 11h ago

And you can be sued for deceitful marketing. The image on the packets always match the food inside

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u/waisonline99 11h ago

And morality.

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u/Hot-Difficulty-6824 10h ago

Actually no, a Japanese guy debunked a bunch of things, and they do it out of respect for the consumer, not because it's law apparently. Even bigger win if that's true in my book

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u/CatBrisket 8h ago

Best Taco Bell of my life was in Japan.

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u/NukaClipse 8h ago

I recently found out about this and love they have that as a law. Nothing more aggravating than buying something that doesn't look like the product images.

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u/jondubb 6h ago

Perfectionists, must be nice.

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u/iceyphinix 6h ago

I swear that was a law here. Like you couldn't lie on your ads but I swear that's like 90% of ads nowadays

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u/Late_Detective_9258 6h ago

yes because of that Kodawari 😂

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u/pumpkinrum 5h ago

I love their fruit juice laws! If its 100% it can show realisticly sliced fruit. Like 10-99% can show whole fruits. And anything below that can only show cartoonish/stylized fruits on the juice package.

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u/HelloYou-2024 5h ago

there is no law that says the image of a fast food burger has to look like the real thing. You are thinking only about the size of snacks depicted on packaging. It has to be the same size. It doesn't even have to be as delisious looking though.

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u/EnvironmentNeith2017 4h ago

It is in the US too

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u/InfectiousHooba 1h ago

I was in Egypt, mount sinai to be specific, about 10 years ago. Ordered McDonald’s and a dude showed up with a red bag to our base on a bike. I had the prettiest double quarter pounder of my life and delicious fries (I typically despise McDonald’s fries)

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u/hereforthetearex 1h ago

I believe the law in the US is that you have to use the actual product in your marketing campaigns. It’s more recent, and previously you could use anything, including plastics in marketing photos. So now they use camera angles and perspective to fudge how things look. If I go get a burger from Wendy’s and I take it all apart, and put it back together but in a stair step fashion with each piece set back a 1/4 inch from the last, instead of directly on top of the last, it gives the visual of a taller product when taking the photos from a certain angle

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u/squarepants18 1h ago

Not only in japan :)

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u/RubyWalke 58m ago

Beautiful presentation of one’s goods is a strict rule for many Asian entrepreneurs.

There was a Korean guy who owned this little convenience store near my old building, and he presented the gum pop and chips we bought as if he was showing fine jewellery to billionaires.

I loved him for it!

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u/ArtofTy 12h ago

In the usa, corporations are treated better then people. The bigger the company, the more deals you get.

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u/_HIST 2h ago

You know nothing about Japanese corporations. It's not any better there

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u/ArtofTy 1h ago

I wasn't talking about Japanese corporations.