[drzaiusapelord]

How would a uneducated/non-expert jury parse this claim?

Tim Meadows, president of Concentrated Aloe Corp., said that nuclear magnetic resonance isn’t reliable for cosmetics because the presence of multiple ingredients can cause interference and there’s no way to test for aloe in finished products. He added that maltodextrin isn’t an adulterant because it can be used in the drying process, and while some ways of processing aloe remove acemannan, that doesn’t mean the aloe isn’t real, he said.

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In other words, we don't really know the answer here and if consumers just ran to the nearest courthouse over every perceived slight in this Libertarian utopia, expect questionable jury settlements to be the norm, much like how our East Texas patent courts seem to have outcomes that are near random and demand settlements sometimes in the billions of dollars. I don't think "run to court" should be our first instinct here.

[CamperBob2]

You either trust the courts, or you don't.

If you do, then your takeaway from this article would be that the system is basically working as intended, at least so far.

If you don't, then you must be in favor of getting rid of the current jury system in favor of something else. What are your thoughts on how the replacement institution(s) should work?

[rhizome]

He's saying that just because they're selling caffeine-free, sugar-free diet Pepsi, that doesn't mean it's not Pepsi. That their cheese might be just canola oil and milk solids, but it's still orange. Just because the "aloe" (maybe call it "alow") they use has been eviscerated of all of its aloe-ness, that doesn't mean it didn't start out as natural aloe, and is that really what's important here?

[logfromblammo]

If you take an aloe plant and remove every quality and chemical that distinguishes it as aloe, it is no longer aloe. Homeopathy has no scientific merit. There is no distinguishable difference between pure, distilled water that has been sourced from clean lake water, or from seawater, or from urine, or from aloe plants. An H2O molecule has no capacity to store even a single bit of memory.

It is theoretically possible to perform organic synthesis with petroleum feedstocks to produce an artificial chemical mixture indistinguishable from natural aloe juice. But that would not be aloe, either. It would be imitation aloe. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about imitation products, provided they are not presented in commerce as the genuine article. It might, after all, be an inferior and imperfect imitation, which would not be acceptable to consumers at the same prices.

The important issue is that people may believe that the bottled product is substantially similar to cutting a leaf from an aloe plant and squeezing out the juice from it. It is whether they are getting what they thought they paid for. If no chemical can be found in the product that can only economically be sourced from an aloe plant, clearly, the consumer has been cheated.

[drzaiusapelord]

If the medicinal action of Aloe is preserved I doubt anyone would feel "cheated."

[rhizome]

Yep.

[nickik]

The idea in such cases should never be that every single consumer sues the product seller.

Once we actually have suspicion the court or some private person can find another way to prove it. Since proving such a thing might be very value, there is lots of Incentives to do it. Whistle blowing might be interesting in this context.

One could also just look at their production, ask former employees and so on.

Does not seem impossible to handle.