Indeed and pretty disingenuous from the bakeries. Mislabelling as containing allergens when it does not can lead to a false sense of security or comfort in consumers. In that they may potentially consume an item and discover that it is labelled for the allergen, and subsequently assume that the lack of a reaction indicates tolerance. Potentially, leading them to consume accurately labelled products expecting the same non-reaction
If I'm understanding you correctly, the concern is that someone who has e.g. a peanut allergy will eat product A which is labeled as containing peanuts despite not having any, and then decide they must not be allergic so they can eat product B which is also labeled as containing peanuts but actually has them, and have a bad outcome?
This seems a stretch. If the person is eating food labeled as containing an allergen, do we really care whether it is product A or B that produces the bad outcome?
Disagree. There's a concept of people "growing out of allergies". I think it's at least plausible someone could eat product A without checking the label, then subsequently read the label and assume "well I must have grown out of that allergy" and hence proceed to eat product B.
Yeah, and that is just as bad as "contains... " for people that have severe allergies.
The trend for most companies is just to put "may contain traces... " or "manufactured in a facility that also processes... " which will prevent me from buying from those manufacturers.
That's the intended objective. They don't want you buying the food if there's a potential risk you're going to later sue them if whatever minuscule probability of a contamination event does in fact happen to occur.
They have judged that as a market segment, the revenue they can get from selling guaranteed sesame free products is less than the cost of producing it. Other manufacturers may decide it's worth it if they price their bread higher, and then the issue becomes whether you are prepared to pay the price they are asking to cover the increase costs.
Remember at the end of the day, what you eat is a choice. There's no reason why you have to eat bread, but even if you choose to eat it, making the choice to buy more expensive hand-made bread rather than the ultra-processed mass-produced stuff is usually much better for your body in ways other than just not containing sesame.
