How to choose safe imported food?
The queen at home told her that the grapeseed oil for cooking was almost gone, so hurry up to replenish it. When I was young, I hurriedly went to the e-commerce platform where I usually buy to prepare to place an order. Unexpectedly, the Spanish grape seed oil that I usually buy has been taken off the shelves. The whole store is full of cooking oil. I have lived in North America for many years and often travel to Europe. A foreign brand that the manservant who cooks and buys vegetables in the supermarket has never seen before. The food safety crisis of oil products has not been passed for a few years, and everyone seems to have forgotten it, or is Taiwan too internationalized so that the edible oil market is contending among a hundred schools of thought in Taiwan? 
The same situation also applies to other food and wine. Due to food safety issues, the Food and Drug Administration has tightened the control on imported food, but compared with bulk food imports, the control on packaging and selling in Taiwan is relatively loose, and the profits of manufacturers are also relatively low. high. How can a consumer like me, who is as fussy as I am, distinguish the pros and cons of these foreign brands that I have never seen in Taiwan? Here I would like to share with you my experience over the years.
- Google Google God
When you see a brand you don’t know, ask Google first ! These days, if the food company does not have a website, or only has a Taiwan website of .tw, or a company in a non-English-speaking country only has an English website, or even found information All are in Chinese, this foreign product is obviously not international enough, let’s skip it first !
- Packaging and Labeling
Imported food has strict Chinese labeling requirements. However, the brand of a major food factory must have a standard CIS enterprise identification system. Even if the importer’s sales volume is large, it is unlikely to change the packaging for Taiwan alone, and even all the words on the packaging are in Chinese, so seeing this For packaging, first check whether the foreign language packaging in foreign countries is similar. If the product is only found in Chinese packaging, or the foreign language packaging does not look like a foreign design style, we will first give the opportunity to others.
- place of origin
In recent years , the WTO has lowered trade barriers between countries, so few food companies have gone to the local area to set up factories for production or packaging due to tariff barriers. Therefore, if the origin or factory of a food with a foreign language trademark is not located in the home country or the raw material supplier, or even if the imported bulk food ( such as flour, etc. ) is not in the original small package, it is best not to take chances.
- price
Taiwanese people like to compare prices the most. Any food that sells cheap is conscientious. Why don’t you think about it? In countries with higher national income than ours, organic farming with lower yields, cold-pressed virgin with higher cost, or The aged balsamic vinegar that has been placed in an urn for more than 6 years before it can be sold for money is shipped from Europe to Taiwan. Manufacturers and importers also need to make profits. Why is the selling price lower than other similar products? cut ?
- container
Generally, large foreign food manufacturers with a history use glass or plastic bottles, mostly of special specifications, with company logos or words embossed on the bottles, and patent registrations. If it is a domestically produced or subpackaged product, most of the containers used are public version ( ready-made specifications ) containers. Therefore, the more special the container looks, the higher the chance that it is a genuine product from abroad. On the other hand, the more similar the bottle and cap of the food labeled in foreign languages are to domestic products, the better we ignore it.
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