The hidden side of "the ingredient list is very clean"
Pang Dong Lai's juice takes "clean ingredients" to the extreme. Based on what could be seen on site, in January 2024 Pang Dong Lai's juice was selling fast, with plenty of customers picking up whole cases to take home. The ingredient list was just water and concentrated juice — no white sugar, no flavorings, no colors, no preservatives — which gave consumers used to seeing long strings of chemical names an instant sense of "safety."
According to the 2024 China Shopper Report by Bain and Kantar Worldpanel, concepts like NFC juice and 100% juice are replacing traditional low-concentration juice and driving consumers to trade up. Sales of these premium juices grew 40% in 2023, pushing the average price of the juice category up 8.9%.
Consumers are voting with their wallets, telling retailers: we're willing to pay for "clean ingredients."
But what consumers may not know is how much wordplay is packed into those four words, "clean ingredients."
Take a certain brand's 100% peach juice. The ingredient list reads: water, concentrated peach juice, peach pulp. Looks simple enough — water is water, and concentrated peach juice is peach juice with the water evaporated out for easier storage. But what is peach pulp?
According to the National Food Safety Standard for the Labeling of Prepackaged Foods (GB 7718-2011), if an ingredient is a compound ingredient made up of two or more other ingredients, the name of the compound ingredient should be listed in the ingredient list, followed by its original ingredients in parentheses in descending order by amount added.
In other words, "peach pulp" as a compound ingredient should have its original components listed. But on Pang Dong Lai's ingredient list there are just the two characters for "peach pulp" — no parentheses, no further explanation.
So what exactly is peach pulp?
In the food industry, fruit pulp is a semi-finished raw material, usually made by mixing fruit flesh, juice, water and various food additives. To ensure the pulp's stability, mouthfeel and shelf life, manufacturers add thickeners, stabilizers, acidity regulators and so on.
Thickeners, also called gelling agents, are food additives mainly used to improve and increase a food's viscosity and to maintain the color, aroma, taste and stability of fluid and jelly foods. According to national standard GB2760-2011, the Standard for the Use of Food Additives in Food Safety, common thickeners include pectin, xanthan gum, carrageenan, guar gum and locust bean gum.
These thickeners are widely used in the food industry. In dairy processing, pectin is typically used as a gelling agent, thickener, stabilizer, suspending agent and emulsifier; in fruit pulp and juice it provides stabilizing and thickening effects.
More importantly, thickeners are often not used alone but in combinations. Combinations with good synergistic effects include CMC with gelatin, carrageenan with guar gum and CMC, agar with locust bean gum, and xanthan gum with locust bean gum. These blends can produce a viscosity-stacking effect, forming stronger gels or improving a product's stability and mouthfeel.
So when consumers see "peach pulp" on an ingredient list, what they're seeing may not be pure peach flesh and juice — it may be a compound ingredient containing pectin, xanthan gum, carrageenan and various other thickeners and stabilizers.
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