I found a number of these types of pictures on a social media site and contacted each of the photographers  in order to get the rights to use the pictures, so far I’ve only heard back from one.. below is that picture.

The thing you notice first is not the most important thing to us, broken berries can happen for several reasons. Unless we had a whole lot more detail (pictures of the outside of the box, the shipping label and such) we really would not be able to determine the cause of the breaking. The breaking could be caused by dozens of reasons, everything from missing gel packs to carrier mis-handling to the after effects of a bad delivery address, we have no way of knowing for sure. But as we said that’s not the most important thing…

What we see is that the product delivered never matched the pictures on their website, while we know from their ingredient list that the product is not dipped in Milk, White or Dark Chocolate; what we see is no leaves. It’s not just that the leaves were lost on one berry during dipping process but that they were taken off before dipping. While I’m not certain: the removal of the leaves is more indicative of a machine dipped/ conveyor belt type of operation rather than hand dipping.

All of the problem pictures I found for this competitor had the same missing leaves, and that was not what was pictured in their many TV commercials, print ads or their web site. The product does not even match the marketing materials included in the box (as seen below). It’s not the result of an accident in packing,  delivery or customer actions: It’s a very basic change to the product; one that was done on purpose.

Even with the logo that you can see in the marketing materials above: just avoiding that one web site will not keep you from running into other parts of the same company with the same product, they operate under many different names and web sites, they own shopping channels, a  baseball team, TV stations and so much more that it would boggle your mind. The product is also sold by totally unrelated companies, they are so pervasive that it’s hard to avoid them.

Ignore the broken berries for a second: The product in the box does not match what was promised, no leaves, no stems, and not milk, white or dark chocolate. But since their customers are also saying they are involved in the “easy saver scam”:  should it be a surprise that their product looks nothing like their marketing materials?

Of course we sell chocolate covered strawberries so when  you are ready for real chocolate and whole strawberries with the leaves, dipped by hand to order give us a try.

Counterfeit products, false advertizing claims and credit card scams are things the public hears about every day, but as we was researching the many online complaints about Edible Arrangements we found something more disturbing:

Religious Intolerance.

Edible Arrangements is a franchise system, similar to many restaurant chains, the stores are owned by individual operators and the overall concept/franchisor is owned by someone else.

A few months ago 170 franchises filed a lawsuit against Edible Arrangements International, Inc, some of the things listed in the lawsuit are the type things you’d expect,

• changes in mandating suppliers,
• forced software purchases (which have to be made from a company the CEO controls),
• forced customer list sharing (privacy concerns with that one),
• changes in the payment percentage to the individual stores for internet orders (they lost 80% of the payment),
•  changes in mandatory days the stores are open…

All valid and fairly normal grievances.  When I looked into the last change I found some things that disturbed me.

Edible Arrangements International (the parent company or franchisor who also runs DippedFruit.Com) is run by Tariq Farid, a  U.S. citizen  who was born in Pakistan.   Our biggest concern is best described by the following quote from a franchisee:

 “They have now released new hours mandating we have to be open on Sundays, however they allow” … “ Muslim owned stores to be closed Friday. Christian owned stores are told they have to be open on Sunday…NO EXCEPTIONS will be made. This is Religious Discrimination!”

We have a problem with this, this is America, the same rules need to apply to everybody. If one religious group must have their stores open on their holy day then the same should apply to other religious groups as well. When a company discriminates against store owners of a particular faith then something is wrong with the mindset of the discriminators.

For many Christians Sunday is not a “mandatory” day of rest, there are some Christians who observe on Saturday and I seem to remember that there was even a religious group who observed on Wednesday. Some Christians can go to services on Saturday night and have it “count” as Sunday…  but that is not the point, having one set of rules for people of one faith and a different set of rules for people not of that faith is un-American, divisive and only serves to create ill will.

To us the day of the week does not matter, if you are showing favoritism towards one group by allowing them to close on their day of observance then the same rules need to apply to people of all faiths.

Personally we don’t care that Mr Farid is Muslim, that’s not the point: the point is that he is setting rules retroactively, rules that discriminate against people of other religious faiths.

Online sources:
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/edible-arrangements-franchise-c335037.html
http://www.franchisepublicity.com/edible-arrangements-franchisor-responds-to-franchise-lawsuit/

So what is real chocolate?,
We’ll use white chocolate as an example. Below is the pertinent section of the regulation on White Chocolate (from http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=163)

“White chocolate contains not less than 20 percent by weight of cacao fat”

Cocoa fat is what the FDA calls cocoa butter.

Below is an example of a sample of partof an incorrect ingredients label from a competitor.

Look at it closely, there is no cocoa butter in the definition of any of the chocolate types.

As you can see there is no cocoa butter in any of the so called “chocolate”, yet the company that makes and sells the product continues to advertise “chocolate covered strawberries”.  All the mislabeled ”chocolate”  above is partially hydrogenated oil based, there is zero cocoa butter.

Our Chocolate Covered Strawberries are made with real gourmet chocolate and all have cocoa butter just like you would expect from a gourmet gift.

according to the research the UPromise toolbar can send your credit card information over the Internet, to third parties, without any encryption at all.

That’s a huge violation of the customers privacy  and really bad for the safety of your credit card information.

below is the source article for this
http://www.benedelman.org/news/012110-1.html

Some of the same fake chocolate strawberry companies that have had problems (class action lawsuits) in the past are involved with this mess.  For security purposes you might want to rethink any toolbar that you have installed as they can access any data on your system without restrictions.