Tomato Fight

Washington attorney Rick Frank has gone to great stains to represent his client. More than one of Frank’s white Oxford shirts has been splattered with tomato sauce, and so far he’s ruined five ties.

To congressional offices on Capitol Hill, the Food and Drug Administration, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs and the press, Frank has taken his traveling tomato-sauce show, conducting comparative taste tests to prove his client’s point.

“Tomatoes really stain,” concluded Frank, a partner at the law firm of Olson, Frank & Weeda.

Frank represents a group of seven small-scale California tomato processors who make canned tomato products from fresh tomatoes. But there’s more than one way to make tomato puree, and that’s what riles the California Packed From Fresh Tomato Coalition.

Two cans made by the same company that have the same label could contain two different products, the coalition contends.

The old-fashioned way to process tomatoes is to take fresh tomatoes, heat them to evaporate some of the juices and then can them. Approximately 60% of processed tomato products are still made by this method.

During the last two decades, however, large-scale makers of tomato sauce who were buying up old-line little guys started using another process too.

This method involves two steps:

First, fresh tomatoes are heated to higher temperatures so that more of the juices are evaporated. The result is a thick paste or concentrate, which contains less water and costs less to ship than products made the traditional way.

In the second step, the paste, which can be stored during the off-season, is remanufactured or reconstituted at facilities that may be remote from the fields. After water is added to the concentrate, it is heated, homogenized, sterilized and packed into cans.

The coalition contends that fresh tomatoes make a better-tasting processed product than remanufactured ones. Big food companies say it’s a distinction without a difference.

Firms such as Del Monte and Hunt-Wesson, which process tomatoes by both methods, don’t have to indicate on the front labels of their products which way they have been made.

But the California coalition wants them to and is pressing the federal government to require that the front labels of all tomato sauces, purees, crushed tomatoes and pizza sauces made from reconstituted or remanufactured tomatoes state that fact.

In its proposal to revamp food labels, the Food and Drug Administration has asked for comments on the issue.

The controversy has grabbed the attention of more than just Rick Frank’s dry cleaner. Attorneys general from 32 states have jointly written to the FDA in support of the California group’s position, as have more than two dozen national and local consumer organizations.

As the result of a letter-writing campaign instigated by the coalition, the FDA has received almost 4,000 postcards and 500 letters from restaurateurs ranging from mom-and-pop pizza parlors to white-tablecloth establishments. In the FDA’s docket room, some of the correspondence is reportedly drizzled with splotches of dried tomato sauce.

“We look at it as truth in labeling and purely and simply that,” says Bob Isle, president of Stanislaus Food Products, one of the California coalition firms. If a company wants to make the reconstituted product, “go ahead and do it. Just tell the consumer or restaurateur what’s in the can.”

John Cady, president of the National Food Processors Assn., a group of the country’s larger food companies, opposes such a requirement and has even brought it to the attention of the White House as an example of unnecessary regulation.

If the label states that the product has been “remanufactured,” a “lot of people might say ‘eeuw, I don’t want that,’ ” Cady said. “It’s a marketing issue. They (fresh packers) want to gain a sales advantage. This is not a consumer issue because someone says sauce made from fresh tomatoes makes better pizza,” he said. “I can get you 10 people who can tell you there’s no difference.”

The California Packed From Fresh Tomatoes Coalition decided to find out if consumers could tell the difference. Blind surveys it conducted in shopping malls in 1990 showed that only one out of every 15 people found no difference between two unseasoned puree products, and out of those finding the products different, almost two out of three preferred the product packed from fresh tomatoes.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in purchasing products for the school-lunch program, last year specified that it would buy only crushed tomatoes made from fresh tomatoes. Darrell Breed, chief of the USDA’s fruit and vegetable commodity-procurement branch, said that school food-service officials were complaining that “some products that were called crushed tomatoes were not what crushed tomatoes should look like.”

Nonetheless, the agency is taking another look at remanufactured tomatoes made by different companies that may provide a perfectly acceptable product.

Raymond Newberry, a regulatory guidance officer at the FDA who participated in one of Frank’s tomato tastings, said he found “an obvious difference in taste, texture and even color” between products packed from fresh versus remanufactured tomatoes.

But Bill Spain, vice president of government and industry relations for Del Monte, said that in order to conduct a valid comparison between the two products, every other variable has to be the same.

They’d “have to be the same tomato variety, grown from the same grower, harvested at the same time and packed at the same plant,” he said. There are tremendous differences in the taste of processed tomato products that have nothing to do with how they were manufactured, Spain added.

What’s more, he said, Del Monte wouldn’t manufacture and sell both products if there were a “significant difference that turned off the consumer.”