Ingredients labelling

[Camilla Charles]

Hello everyone, I have visited this site on many occasions and have at last got round to posting!

I have a question about the ingredients label... this particular eg is from Sainsbury's Luxury Belgian Plain Chocolate and list them as:Sugar, Cocoa mass, Cocoa butter, emulsifier:lecithin, Flavouring:vanillin, Cocoa solids 51% minimum

the warning label says it contains MILK

but which of the above ingredients contains milk, can anyone tell me?

Both my children are diary allergic (my husband and I are not, which makes life a little difficult at times.) They have been allergic since birth I believe, it was confirmed when they were about 7 months old using the RAST test, fortunately both were sick within seconds of consuming dairy and they did not suffer anaphylaxis. They are now 8 and 5, and particularly the eight year old the allergy seems to be turning in to an intolerance because now if he eats something predominantly dairy he is sick about 12 hours later......may be there is some hope he is growing out of it.

Thanks in advance

p.s this is a great site....I have visited a few over the years searching for help and ideas!! thanks to all involved

[Copper]

Welcome to the site. Well from the list of ingredients I can't see any dairy. There are two possible reasons -

1 There is no dairy but they are covering their backs

2 There is a small amount of dairy somewhere - there is a silly rule where they are not obliged to list any ingredient when it is less than 20% or 25% (I can't remember which) of the whole product.

You could try contacting Sainsbury and asking them. You may have noticed that we are not Sainsbury fans on this site.

Have you tried Tesco organic plain chocolate? It is very nice and not bitter. Ingredients are -
Organic cocoa mass, Organic sugar, Organic cocoa butter, Emulsifier (lecithins).

As the allergy advice is contains soya - the lecithins are derived form soya.

[Camilla Charles]

Many thanks

I have sort of guessed that Sainsbury' isn't a favourite shop on this site from the posts!!!!!
I wondered about 1. but I didn't realise 2. is a possibility which is useful to know about.

I have just added the tesco chocolate bar to my shopping list!

Camilla

[Pam]

I'll second what Copper says. There is either a high risk of cross contamination or they use a small amount of milk which they don't think necessary to add to the ingredients list. If you question this with them please let us know their answer.

Tesco value chocolate is the same - no mention of milk in the ingredients but listed in the allergy advice box. Their answer was that it contains butterfat but less than the percentage that legally has to be listed in the ingredients.

Most of the supermarkets are as bad as this but Sainsburys seems to make more than its fair share of errors and then argues when people claim to have a problem. At least responsible companies accept when someone has a problem and do something about it, like withdrawing the product and re-labelling it. (It took a lot of people a long time to get them to change the packaging on their "non dairy" ice cream which was most certainly not dairy free.)