There is good news for US consumers, the country’s leading mass retailer is making every possible effort to provide them the lowest priced tuna despite sharply rising raw material prices. The bad news is that an important part of the content of those cans consist out of water from a distant Pacific island: as much as 45% of Samoan water.

After hearing so many complaints from American friends about the lousy tuna they get out of a can, we decided it was time to see for ourselves what is really going on today.

We bought 3 cans each of tuna chunks light from the 3 major national brands Starkist (SK), Chicken of the Sea (COS) and Bumble Bee (BB)– as well as Wal-Mart’s own brand “Great Value” . None of these labels showed any country of origin. Along with several other smaller brands sold in the US we took them to our atuna test kitchen. Since we are Europeans and not equipped to determine the “pressed cake weight”, which is the method the FDA prescribes to determine the pure tuna weight in the can, so we just  tried to approach our product tests as average consumers.

After opening the can with a opener we gently pressed the lid to let the water out and let the can drain for a minute – until we had the feeling most of the water must had come out – and considered the tuna meat ready to eat on a sandwich or mix it with mayonnaise.

The outcome was rather shocking! After opening the cans of Wal-Mart and America’s 3 leading brands – we had to re-read the label to be sure it mentioned the word: “Chunks”. All 4 brands only provided us a pure flake pack – no chunk in sight. In Europe we need at least 70% chunks to call it “chunks” – but in the US 50% chunk is the minimum required. In all these four brands we only found 100% pure flake.

It is hard to understand that the USFDA fills pages of procedures to determine what a chunk and flake are, and has designed ingenious procedures to determine the “pressed cake weight” and the amount of flakes, and at the same time let this kind of deviant product be sold as “Chunk light” at such a massive scale.

When started weighing and checking the numbers – the outcome was even more hair-raising. Wal-Marts cans produced an average drained weight of 97 grams !! out of a 6oz or 170gram net weight can. Bumble Bee provided 120 grams of tuna, StarKist 118 grams and COS 113g. But all of them pure flakes.

All 4 brands were nicely cleaned, had great color, but tasted like water and gave a starchy mouth feel, one of our people compared it to mashed potatoes with too much water in it. Where is the taste and bite of tuna?

When we looked at the amount of water we found that Wal-Mart product contained 78 grams of water and 97 grams of tuna. This means that about 45% of the content is water from American Samoa- where this product was put in the can. However there was one more important ingredient: vegetable broth or better said “Hydrolyzed Vegetable Proteins (HVP)”.

This HVP is doing the magic here, if up to 2 gram are added to tuna meat a retention of water into the tuna meat can be reached of up to 20%. So this means the tuna meat takes up 20% of water – and basically starts to behave like a sponge. If you crush good tuna chunks to become small flakes the uptake of water becomes even better. That explains why all these 4 brands are now selling pure flake packs– but still keep labeling it as chunks.

Why is the US Tuna Foundation (USTF), who represents the 3 major tuna brands, not taking action? Over the last 5 years the USTF has been pushing the FDA to change the specification of chunk light – so it would be measured by drained weight and that the use of HVP would be limited to the use of max. 1 gram – thus putting a stop to the ever-increasing amount of exotic water in tuna cans.

The 3 brands found it necessary for the FDA to take this action, so not only they themselves, but also private labels would be forced to obey by these rules, and that way could up-lift the quality of canned tuna in America back to an acceptable level. They stressed that the private brands of retailers and other importers with product canned in Thailand or Philippines were pushing down the quality, and only if they could be stopped by a new FDA specification – real change in the market could occur.

Well, the fears of the USTF has been proven to be right, Wal-Mart is taking the lead in pushing even more water in the tuna can, and now has become their biggest competitor and mutual enemy. By adding 45% of water to their tuna and selling 100% flakes as chunks, the brands have to respond. Although they have been able to maintain higher drained weights,  they could only achieve that by switching entirely to flake packs.

So who is supplying Wal-Mart this tuna? Remarkably it is not coming from Thailand or the Philippines, but from American Samoa,  where there are only 2 canneries: StarKist and Chicken of the Sea.  The product did not mention any processor or country of origin, which means that it must be domestic US production, from one of these 2 canneries. 

Why on earth would US brands like SK or COS be willing to process a product for America’s largest retailer, which basically destroys their own market – and then follow this trend themselves?  Is Wal-Mart really that powerful?  Have these people been smoking? (Wat bedoel je???)  Or is there actually a business strategy behind it ?

Considering that these companies are led by intelligent people I tend to choose for the last option. So what could possibly be this strategy?

It looks like the 3 brands have concluded that they will never be able to win the race from Wal-Mart of who can put more water into the can.  So they seem to have been forced into the position to consider “canned chunk light” a lost case, which cannot be saved by them anymore. They have ended up in a dead end street.  Many consumers have already lost confidence in the product, and that’s why sales keep declining. Supermarkets only want to continue to chunk light as a loss leader. On which the tuna brands are not making any money anyway. There’s no earning nor a budget for promotions and commercials.

So they have somehow decided to use this lousy quality of chunk light as a tool to drive the consumer away from this cheap low quality commodity product, and almost force them into the direction of the much better quality of tuna in pouches.

Drain-free is what the sales pitch is for tuna in alu-pouches. You can imagine that drain-free will appeal to any consumer of the wet canned tuna product – certainly after digesting a tasteless Wal-Mart sponge with Samoan water. Putting more water in tuna, will drive more consumers to drain-free product, and it will have them appreciate the quality a lot more. The pouch is the product with which the tuna brands can create added value and earn the profits they so badly need. So “canned chunk light” is dead, long live “pouched chunk light”!

But not everybody has given up on “canned chunk light” just yet. We also bought some products in the US that did have more than 50% chunks – some actually even 95%! These were products from retailers or distributors who still believe that there is a market for good quality canned product. Remarkably all these products came from either the Philippines or Thailand, so these all passed the FDA inspection when arriving to port, and some of them were explicitly labeled “NO HVP“ . The product which really stood out to us was the “Stater” brand which had a can with 95% chunks and a drained weight of a 118 grams, and was labeled “chunk light” .

So it can still be done! This way we can bring all those great health advantages of our tuna to the consumers, instead of providing them steel cans with exotic water and some tuna added.