4w ago

Australian owner of Toronto café chain fighting Ottawa to save $8K of Vegemite

www.cbc.ca /news/canada/toronto/australian-canadian-cafe-owner-ordered-remove-vegemite-1.7508893

15 comments

This sucks, but I can understand both sides here.
Canada has strangely high standards when it comes to food regulations. Especially in restaurants. And lowering those could result in an influx of low quality processed foods entering the market.
On the other hand, the reason it's failing to meet the standard is that it has added vitamin B which feels a bit absurd since those additions are allowed in other products here.
I hope this gets resolved in a way that lets this dude keep selling Vegemite at his shop.
- So, uhh...where's the "both sides" to this? "High standards when it comes to food regulations" doesn't work as an excuse for banning healthier food. That's absurd.
  
  Fortification can be used to manipulate some health rating systems. I don't know what system Canada uses, but Health Star is particularly vulnerable to this. Basically you can make a product that's high in fat / salt / sugar look better than it is by adding vitamins. So it makes some kind of sense to restrict fortification to certain classes of foods.
- It's doubly strange because Vegemite is available in their supermarkets.
- The vitamin B in Vegemite is naturally occurring from the yeast process. It’s not added.
  
  https://www.aldi.com.au/product/vegemite-vegemite-370g-000000000000370431
  Ingredients: yeast extract (wheat, barley), salt, mineral salt (508), malt extract (barley), colour (150c), flavours, niacin [aka B3], thiamine [aka B1], riboflavin [aka B2], folate [aka B9].
  Sure sounds like there's some extra added in there to me
- Agreed. It’s not a great standard because fortified foods are still very useful.
  It’s not even dangerous to have that added vitamin B because it’s a water soluble vitamin and the risk of overdosing is negligible