SPELLING AND SUGAR AND SILLINESS, IN SWEDEN

I’m not normally one to shame people, but 2 different products have recently caught my designer eye attention in the past year, and I’d like to know what they were thinking. We keep our freezer stocked with a small selection of frozen meals for those nights we just don’t feel like cooking or to take for a lunch if we’re in a hurry. I’m always glad to find something new since the selection is slow to change and tends to be the same things in every brand (lasagne, meatballs, pasta carbonara). So, I was thrilled to see a few new items in the freezer cabinets at our local ICA, even though I was confused as to why the packaging, produced by a thoroughly Swedish company, was in English.

The Findus Frozen Food brand has been sold in Sweden since 1945. It started out in 1901 as the Scanian Fruit, Wine and Liqueur Factory, but was acquired and renamed the Findus Canning Factory in 1941, before shortening to just Findus. It sells all over Europe, and at one point the company was owned by Nestlé and Unilever, who later sold it again. In addition to frozen foods, they also sell soups, mayonnaise, and pasta sauces, among other things. Findus frozen lasagne products were involved in a horsemeat scandal in 2013 (they weren’t the only ones). Most of the production in Bjuv, Sweden, down here in Skåne where they were founded, ended in 2017, but they’re apparently still going strong all over the continent.

A little over a year ago, Findus launched 4 new frozen food “take away bowls” with chicken, promising fresh new taste combinations. They include roasted chicken with corn and jalapeno sauce, chicken with linguine and zucchini and parmesan sauce, and teriyaki chicken with noodles and veggies. I was excited about the one with zucchini because that is not a vegetable you usually see in Swedish frozen foods. I took one out of the freezer at the store to examine it and realized that the picture on the packaging didn’t show zucchini. It showed snap peas. And even though the packaging was just a sleeve and you could sort of see through the sides of the translucent bowl, I could not tell if the green things were zucchini or if they were snap peas which is what the image showed. I bought one and brought it home to try it. They were snap peas.

I have not written to them, because even though it’s false advertising, I thought maybe it could be an honest mistake and surely others would write in and tell the company to correct either the word or the picture. But it’s a year later and nothing has changed. 😀 While I was writing this post, I googled images for the take away bowls and noticed that the one touting chicken with corn and jalapeno sauce does not show any corn in ITS photo. Hmmmm…

Since I was diagnosed with diabetes in 2015, I’ve mostly sworn off jams, jellies, and juices, since processed fruit products are full of even more sugar than fruit itself, and are mostly a big no-no. I love grape juice, especially white grape juice, but because it’s not a thing here in Sweden, I had substituted for years with pear juice. Pear, as a taste, is as big as, if not bigger than, apple here in Sweden and lots of things in addition to juice, are pear-flavored. Ice cream, candy, sweets, etc. But after I was forced to stop consuming processed fruit products, the only juice I’ve had for years is vegetable (like V8) or tomato. You can imagine how happy I was to find a new brand of sugar-free juices that recently came on the market, and which were available in our local grocery store. There are more and more sugar-free products available these days, which is great.

This line of sugar-free juices is called Lowcaly and is produced by a company out of Gothenburg, Sweden named NJIE, who is also responsible for the extremely successful low-calorie ProPud protein drinks and bars. The juices come in pear (of course), strawberry, white peach, pink lemonade, mango, and raspberry or raspberry sorbet. Except, wait, what?

Sorry, make that rapsbrery. Indeed, make that paer, white paech, stwrabrery, pink leomnade, and mnaog.

Wtah eth ufck?

I haven’t written to them either, because I can’t believe it’s not on purpose. Swedes are too good at English, and honestly, too good at design, to do something like this, ON SIX DIFFERENT fruit juice packages on accident. Almost all Swedes can speak, understand, and write English fluently or semi-fluently because they start English in school in third grade, they consume a shit ton of English media both from the US and the UK, they travel all the time and all over the world, and Swedish and English share language roots from Germanic, so there are lots of linguistic similarities. Most likely it’s a subtle marketing gimmick and it won’t stop anyone from buying their products. In fact, it made me laugh, and because the juices are DELICIOUS, and I now associate their tasty with funny, it’s an added reason to continue buying their juice. Especially rapsbrery. Yum.

And finally, the below product line’s name, which I just find nothing short of ridiculous. Is it supposed to make you think of GOOD? Because as a native-English speaker, it makes ME think GOO. Which is how it is pronounced, even in Swedish, but is maybe not the association you want to have with sauce-heavy ready-to-eat food items. But what do I know? Maybe that’s EXACTLY the association they want!

All I can say about them is that they’re edible. I’ve only tried one or two of their line of 10 products and they were fine but nothing like as delicious as sugar-free stwrabrery fruit juice.

Mood: silly
Music: Kelis—Breakfast