A supermarket label

A comment from my sister sort of inspired this post. Well I suppose it was barely a comment, just a statement that she hated shopping in supermarkets. So I replied of course, that she was missing out on a really interesting expedition - for, as I have said many times before - the whole world and all its problems and achievements is there if you care to look.

Then last night we enjoyed some cheese and salad after our leftovers pie - a success by the way and much helped by the leftover pickled onions that I forgot to scatter over my warm tomato salad on Friday.

As we ate the cheese - a recent discovery for our household, and purchased in Woolworths, although you can buy it in Coles too. I noticed, as I turned the label over, the word Sweden even though the cheese is called Sweberg Swiss. (In very small print on the bit sticking out at the left.) We also chuckled over the picture on the front, which looked almost Parisian. So many tiny, and I suppose almost irrelevant questions to answer from one product label in a supermarket. What a way to spend one's life. Checking out supermarket labels.

And yet. Sometimes, if you investigate, you dscover stories of families rising from the gutters to millionaire status, sometimes you find stories of exploitation, sometimes technological innovation ... Stories of one kind or another anyway.

Today I don't really have much in the way of stories - mostly because of this when I went looking for the company website. There is no website at the moment, and I also could not find out anything more about the company from elsewhere. The overall responsibility for any product you buy in a supermarket is always listed somewhere on the back in tiny print. In this case Delre Internantional who are based in Campbellfield - an industrial suburb of Melbourne, not too far from here and not too far from the Hume Highway and access to Sydney and the north. Not a great place to live probably, but a logistically sensible place to set up a business.

So not much information. But questions. I always have questions. The first one is whether there is any connection to this company Del-Re National - which is a family owned food distribution company. Currently a finalist for an award for Victorian Metro Food Service Delivery from the Foodservice Association Australia. They are finalists for the award which will be announced on the 9th of this month.

However, I suspect the name is just a coincidence. This company is based in Derrimut, which I suppose is not that far away, but in Melbourne's west rather than north. Moreover the business has nothing to do with cheese, which seems to be what Delre International exclusively does. Which, of course, could mean that Delre International is a side business of Del-re National Food Group - or, indeed, vice-versa. Then there's another Delre International - well it might be the same company I suppose - in Blacktown, Sydney, about whom one employee said that management had questionable ethics! Questions, questions, questions - that we probably don't really care about, but which a supermarket label can lead you to if you have nothing else to do! And until they have their website in full operation I don't think I can answer the basic question of who they are.

So much for the company back to the cheese. They obviously also sell a whole range of International cheeses - Dutch smoked, Pecorino and Parmesan, Bulgarian fetta ... Today though I'm just concentrating on the Sweberg cheese.

And here is the original 'information' label from Delre International, before Woolworths stuck their bit of information on top - fundamentally the price. Without that sticker you can see that the cheese is indeed made in Sweden - the cheese is just Swiss style - a kind of Emmenthaler I suppose. And there's not much more to say, other than to note that the rennet in the cheese is of the non-animal variety, which I guess is a nod to the vegetarians of the world.

One question though. The list of ingredients just says pasteurized milk, and the nutritional information includes 'Allergens - MILK Cow' and yet on the ingredients list on the Woolworths site it says Goat's MIlk. Go figure. Personally I suspect this is just a Woolworths mistake. Which might be important for some people - I don't know. Do people actually read these ingredient lists?

What more can I say? Not a lot, although if Delre International's website was up and running I might be able to say a bit more. We like this cheese a lot, but then we are fairly conservative in our cheese tastes I guess. The cheese is made in wheels - you just buy a wedge. Note the design - a row of thick kind of lines - at the top of the picture and then look at the genuine Emmenthaler on the right. So you can see that the Swedes are keen to make an association with that cheese. Is that suspect marketing, or just telling you what to expect of the taste? After all the 'Swe' in the name is surely an indication that this is not really a Swiss cheese?

Does anyone care? I dare say some people of fairly extreme views might get enraged by a cheese-maker sort of pretending that their product is actually something else. But then we Australians do it all the time - well not just the Australians. Everyone does. We make pseudo, Parmesan, cheddar, brie, camembert, fetta ... until we are ordered by the countries of origin that to cease calling them that. Which is when we just change the name to Tasty, or Australian parmesan - not Parmigiano Reggiano, white cheese - I notice that's what the previously Danish fetta is now called in our supermarkets. What matters to the customer is whether they like the taste and whether they can afford it. And we like Sweberg Swiss. Though we should buy some genuine Emmenthaler to compare.

ANOTHER THING

It's Father's Day today - a miserable one at that - and Google has given us one of their Google doodles to celebrate. But what on earth has their chosen design got to do with Father's Day I ask myself? Though I admit that weather-wise it's almost got it right - it was windy earlier on, and there are big black clouds, but the flowers still bloom - well they are beginning to. Weird.

YEARS GONE BY

September 7

2024 - Choices - leftover soup

2023 - Capsicum (peppers) and pasta

2022 - Gleanings

2021 - Cubist bananas

2020 - Missing

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Comfort food - someone else's thoughts - a sort of A word from ...

2018 - I seem to have written two posts on this day - Chicken soup for a cold

2017 - The end of a long project

2016 - Oversize