More Newly Labeled Gluten-free Products

Since my career now totally revolves around the gluten-free industry, I do my best to find new products to tell people about and review as many products and restaurants as my waistline can handle! While I avoided grocery shopping for years, these days I’m kind of obsessed with investigating exactly what gluten-free items my local stores carry. It’s likely that Publix cameras catch me reading labels for half an hour and then see me leave with two items! 

Though I don’t shop at Kroger often, I went to one recently to redeem some FREE product coupons from Helen’s Kitchen. Unfortunately, the products Kroger had from the line did not include any of the gluten-free versions. But I did find something quite exciting. Kroger brand hashbrown patties are actually labeled gluten-free! Almost every other brand I’ve checked in the past clearly states ‘contains WHEAT’ on it and this is the first one I’ve seen labeled gluten-free. The Kroger label gluten-free list does not list the hashbrowns so it must be a fairly new item - or a reformulated one.   

There is a new Ore-Ida 4-Pk of hashbrowns pack out that does not list any gluten ingredients. As far as I could tell it is not labeled gluten-free, but the  9-Pk. of hashbrowns is on the company’s gluten-free list. That product is also not labeled gluten-free – or it was not the last time I checked it. The new 4-Pk. of Ore-Ida hashbrowns does not appear to be on their website anywhere so it must be new.   

The other gluten-free find was at a Publix we don’t normally shop at. Since Udi’s recently sent me a care package of goodies, I needed to put their amazing pizza crusts to use. Due to an overloaded schedule of late, I need all the cooking short cuts I can take so I wanted to use cooked cut up chicken for the pesto chicken pizzas. 

Knowing that some of the cooked chicken are gluten-free I started reading labels of several items in the meat case. Low and behold I could not believe my eyes when I went to read the Perdue Short Cuts Chicken (original roasted) package and saw the term GLUTEN FREE right under the ingredients! The gluten-free list on the Purdue websiteis fairly extensive, though not all products are sold in all stores that carry Purdue products. The Perdue Short Cut Chicken is also free of MSG!  

When I find newly labeled items I try and call the companies that make them to say thank you. Even though Hellman’s mayo has always been gluten-free, when they added ‘Gluten Free’ to the label, I called the company to thank them for adding the term to the product label. Since ingredients often change, the only way we can determine an item’s safety is to read the label. If the term gluten-free is clearly listed on the product, it makes our lives simpler. I’d love companies to also list ‘contains gluten’ on products that do. Many other countries are fortunate that their packaged foods are labeled that way. To date I’ve come across about five items that stated they contain gluten in the U.S.  It’s very nice to see that and I’m hoping that more companies will take it upon themselves to adopt that practice, regardless of what the law requires.

Special thanks to both Kroger an Purdue for helping us all shop a little faster!  Extra special thanks to Butterball for reformulating their gravy to be gluten-free as well. If you missed my post about that exciting news, you can read it here.