Coconut water, which has been popular for several years, has collapsed at the speed of light in the past few days. The reason is that shortly before the Chinese New Year, the well-known evaluation self-media "Dad Review" released a video, revealing the hidden rules of the coconut water industry - using a very low-cost three-step operation of "adding water, adding sugar, and adding flavors", you can blend the so-called "zero additive" healthy drinks.
After the new year, the "Beijing News" Consumer Research Institute came directly to the hammer. They sent four popular "100% coconut water" products with the highest sales on the market for inspection.
All the products whose ingredients list simply said "coconut water" were found to contain "exogenous water" and "exogenous sugar". . .
Moreover, whether by accident or on purpose, the editors of the Beijing News put an invalid mosaic on the brands in their reports.
Netizens quickly identified several products based on the style of the outer packaging, and the customer service staff of several brands said in interviews that their products were fine.
However, the trust in coconut water in the market has been greatly reduced. The share price of IF coconut jellyfish company IFBH, one of the parties involved, evaporated nearly 10 billion Hong Kong dollars in response.
Subsequently, IFBH issued a solemn statement through its official Weibo, once again stating that its coconut water can withstand the test.
So, what is going on? How could a good coconut water turn into sugar water overnight?
Jiang Jiang also did some research and found out about the coconut water incident.It may become a turning point for domestic food security in the future..
To make this clear, let’s start from the beginning and talk about the history of coconut water.
For coconut water, Luckin’s raw coconut latte is definitely the purple star that fell from the sky.
With the happiness of 9.9 per cup, the raw coconut flavor has been put on the altar. Looking through the entire market, it is difficult to find products in milk tea shops and coffee shops that do not have raw coconut flavor.
Although Luckin is popular for its thick coconut milk squeezed from coconut meat, this raw coconut storm has successfully completed market education and allowed the coconut water next door, which focuses on refreshing, low-calorie, and healthy, to take off.
For a time, “100% NFC coconut water” was everywhere in convenience stores and live broadcast rooms.
What everyone promotes is that the ingredient list is so clean that only coconut water is the only one, which is a pure porter of nature. Pregnant women, babies, and fitness bloggers can drink it with confidence. . .
There is even a magical saying that "drinking coconut water can replenish amniotic fluid".
As coconut water has been put on the altar, the controversy about coconut water fraud has also become an urban mystery legend.
The old friend from Zhiwei Next Door has conducted some research before and found that some brands on the market will replace the green coconut (tender coconut) that should be used in raw materials with old coconut in order to lower the price to attract consumers; some import concentrated coconut water from abroad, and then mix it with water in proportion to restore it; and some merchants simply use technology and hard work to prepare it in order to win the low price. . .
If you look at many live broadcast rooms on the Internet, a 1L bottle of 100% coconut water is on sale for only 9.9 yuan, and some even buy a whole box for more than 10 yuan. If you say this thing is real, I don’t really believe it.
Because if the raw material is really fresh green coconut shipped from Southeast Asia or Hainan, 1L of coconut water will cost at least 3-4 green coconuts. According to the current market, the cost of just green coconut is about 30 yuan, which does not include cold chain transportation, aseptic filling production lines, labor costs, marketing expenses, etc.
Obviously, such philanthropists should not exist.
So is it possible that in order to save costs, they all switched to sour and astringent old coconut as raw materials?
Let me show you some data: In the past few years, as coconut water became popular, the price of low-end old coconuts gradually increased. The purchase price once increased nearly 10 times to 4,000 yuan per ton. This is reasonable. The demand has increased, and the price increase of raw materials is the law of the market.
But in the past two years, more and more coconut water has been sold. As a result, the purchase price of old coconut water has dropped back to the price of cabbage, 400 yuan.
The price of high-end natural raw material green coconut has not changed much, and the price of low-end natural raw material old coconut has continued to fall. Therefore, it can only be said that everyone understands how to produce those affordable 100% coconut water whose sales have soared on the market.
What's even more damning is that these fraudulent and bad coins are driving away good coins like crazy.
Consumers take a quick look and see that the ingredient list is the same anyway, so they must buy the cheaper one.
The result is: honest people go bankrupt because the cost is too high and cannot sell; counterfeiters make a lot of money and take away all the market share.
At this time, many friends must be asking, since it is so obvious to add water and sugar, why can't the usual domestic food inspections fail to detect it?
To put it bluntly, this is not because the supervision is not working hard, but because the enemy is too cunning.
First of all, there is currently no national standard for coconut water as a food category in China.
The only group standard was released at the end of last year by the Industrial Technology Research Institute of China Light Industry Development Research Center in conjunction with Hangzhou Photosynthetic Plant Food Technology Co., Ltd., Zhejiang Beverage Industry Association, Shanghai Quality Supervision and Inspection Technology Research Institute and other units.
But group standards are different from national standards. They are voluntary standards. Unless a company declares that it has implemented a certain group standard, there is a basic guarantee. You cannot simply think that as long as a new group standard is released, all companies in the market will implement it.
There are no current national standards. All coconut water basically only needs to meet the standard for fruit and vegetable juices (GB/T 31121). Under the GB/T 31121 standard, it basically only limits total acid, soluble solids, preservatives, sweeteners, colorants, microorganisms, etc., and there are no additional regulations for more added ingredients such as water and foreign sugar.
This leaves a lot of gray areas that can be exploited by unscrupulous businesses. . .
And if you want to accuse them of not being 100% natural coconut water, it’s a bit difficult.
Test according to the fruit and vegetable juice standards mentioned earlier. You send a bottle of blended coconut water, and the instrument first detects the microbial and heavy metal content. As long as the merchant's aseptic filling production line meets the standards and the water used is clean and purified water, you can easily get full marks for this.
Then there is the investigation of additives such as preservatives and sweeteners. As long as merchants do not use these low-level chemical compounds, but use white sugar, fructose syrup, and purified water, they will be regarded as regular food ingredients.
A further step will be to check the soluble solids (such as Brix value, which reflects the sugar content), total acid, and pH value.
Pure natural coconut water has a soluble solids content of approximately 4 to 6. Counterfeiters only need to add tap water to old coconut water, then pour high fructose syrup into it, and accurately blend the soluble solids to about 5. Once the testing instrument sees that the data meets the standard, it will be released directly.
The most common nutritional label on packaging is the one that says "protein, fat, carbohydrate, sodium, energy." The instrument can only analyze a basic molecular structure. For example, if sugar is detected, it is classified as carbohydrate. It is impossible to tell whether it is naturally grown fructose or fructose syrup hydrolyzed from corn starch.
To put it bluntly, conventional testing has no ability to ask: "Are the water and sugar in your only coconut?"
In this way, even if the ingredient list says "coconut water only", the test report will still pass, and everyone will be safe.
What made a great contribution to the coconut water house collapse incident was a technology called stable isotope fingerprinting. This thing can be said to have done a "DNA paternity test" for coconut water.
When we were in the second grade of elementary school, our teacher told us that matter is made up of atoms, and atoms are made up of nuclei and electrons. There are protons and neutrons in the nuclei.
And if two elements have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons, then they are isotopes of each other.
For example, deuterium and tritium, the raw materials that everyone often hears used for nuclear fusion, are actually hydrogen elements. The difference is the number of neutrons inside. The neutron number of 0 is hydrogen, the neutron number of 1 is deuterium, and the neutron number of 2 is tritium.
The content of this isotope in various organisms and substances is not completely random, and will have its own characteristics. Therefore, these unique isotope compositions are also called "isotope fingerprints."
This is like a foreigner and a Sichuanese. No matter how they disguise themselves, once they eat hot pot, their ability to eat spicy food engraved in their DNA cannot be lied at all.
Therefore, in many scientific research fields, isotope detection is used for traceability and tracking. In recent years, this technology has been gradually extended to the field of food safety testing.
By taking advantage of the different absorption preferences of plants for isotopes of carbon in the air when performing photosynthesis, we can analyze the specific raw materials in the product.
In this coconut water incident, Dad Reviews and the Beijing News both used stable isotope fingerprint technology.
Because coconut prefers C3 (carbon three) during the growth process, while corn and sugar cane prefer C4 (carbon four).
Not only that, the European testing agency found by the Beijing News has a database of global coconut samples. They found that coconuts have different dialects and accents similar to humans in different regions. Information such as oxygen-18 and oxygen-16 in coconuts produced in different regions are also different.
When they compared the coconut water data submitted by the Beijing News for inspection, they found that the coconut water data did not match their database at all, so they suspected that external water was added during the production process.
Although IF, one of the parties involved, also threw out his own test report in an attempt to prove himself, but now it seems that the two fighting reports will only make consumers more confused.
No matter who is right or wrong in the end, the coconut water industry’s trust filter of blindly buying 100% natural products with closed eyes has been completely shattered.
This also inadvertently tore off the last fig leaf of the entire beverage industry.
After all, I spent more money just to buy products with better quality, but now you tell me that these big brands may not be able to hold up? Several colleagues in the editorial department who drank coconut water as water looked at the cups in their hands and expressed that the sky was falling. . .
If you think about it carefully, many niche drinks have become increasingly popular in recent years, such as a certain birch juice and a certain thorn juice. How can their quality be guaranteed without compulsory national standards?
In the past, when buying drinks, we learned to read the ingredient list for the sake of health. Nowadays, the ingredient list no longer works, so we have to look at the implementation of national standards. Now, in order to take a sip of real coconut water, we have to wait for the evaluation agency to use hard-core technology such as isotope fingerprinting. Consumers who want to drink healthy drinks are forced to become experts in anti-counterfeiting.
The collapse of coconut water is probably just the tip of the iceberg. To prevent bad coins from driving out good coins, it is definitely not enough to rely on a few media and evaluation institutions to use high technology to test DNA.
Although the advancement of science and technology can reveal the true colors of those Li Gui who fish in troubled waters, if we really want to end this farce, we must rely on increasingly sound and standardized national standards.
After all, buying drinks every day with the rigor of a paternity test is something that a working man cannot do.