Gluten free and May Contain WHEAT. Not a selling point.
Thank you for the warning, but let’s take off the gluten free label, shall we?
What’s worse, is that their gluten free logo (which, at a glance, looks like the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness GF logo) is very prominent on the front and back of the package. The May Contain Wheat statement? Not so much. I will freely admit that I probably aggravate the heck out of my non-Celiac friends with how painstakingly careful I am about not getting sick. And I still missed that warning.
It’s extremely small and the color blends in with the package. I didn’t catch it until I had popped one in my mouth. The only thing that saved me from getting more than an initial bite in was I had put them in the fridge since it’s so hot here. Thus, they were very hard and I had only started to get a good bite into the first one when I did a double-take, and then panicked. Cue spitting TruFru into the trash, and lots of rinsing and spitting. And panicking. I am allergic to wheat on top of having Celiac Disease. I learned this the hard way with wheat grass before I knew about Celiac. It is a vastly different reaction to when I get glutened.
Thankfully nothing came of this. I did immediately email the company. This is their reply:
Thank you so much for reaching out and for your support! Our products are gluten free. However, our Hyper-Dried products are produced in facilities that produce other items containing gluten. We clean and test our production lines and test our products to ensure there is no cross-contamination, but we place this labeling on our products out of an abundance of caution. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
If they are produced in other facilities, then how they contaminating your lines? Shouldn’t the be produced and bagged up elsewhere?
And if you’re doing the label out of an abundance of caution, why do you make it so hard to find while making the gluten free status very eye catching?
My guess was it’s the granola causing the issue, because of the oats. I asked. They didn’t respond to that question. The granola packages aren’t labeled GF and they also are missing the may contain wheat statement, when they are very likely to contain wheat because of how easy it is to cross contaminate oats.
And wheat isn’t the only source of gluten.
I haven’t written them back yet. But I will. If I get a further response, I will update this post.
