[scurvy]

"Why was iron low?" "We don't know." "It's better now?" "Yes we fixed it!"

If they don't know what's wrong, how did they know what to fix? This is still fishy to me. Also, shame on the author for using the term "ratted out" when this company was selling a substandard product to Americans.

[dreamcompiler]

Those "standards" likely don't mean very much. As the original article (from December) points out, the standards were developed in the 1940s to make it harder for Japanese noodles to compete, not because of any real nutritional lack. People in other countries eat pasta that doesn't meet American "standards" and they seem to do just fine.

[scurvy]

"Laws shmaws" is not a great defense.

[estaseuropano]

If you read the original article it tries for a long time to figure this requirement out and it's just arbitrary and apparently rarely ever checked (so also not checked for other pasta products, imported or not). The requirement also doesn't match those in other countries, e.g. in the EU you probably can't sell this product as its not allowed to be enriched (same as all US products have to black out their ridiculous and evidence-free health claims when selling in the EU; any "American food" section will have stickers over these parts of the packaging).

So while you are technically correct that the product is substandard, you could well argue that the issue is the arbitrary standard rather than the actual product.

[eeZah7Ux]

> arbitrary standard

They are not just arbitrary, they are often deliberately antagonizing imports.

[avalys]

My understanding is that there’s nothing objectively substandard about it - this is an arbitrary protectionist trade regulation that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

[dirkt]

> If they don't know what's wrong, how did they know what to fix?

Pure speculation, but for example if they did design a process to enrich their pasta with iron, tested it initially, but then never tested it again (who cares if there's iron in pasta...), and then it stopped working for some reason (or possibly never worked reliably in the first place). And then instead of trying to find out what made this process not work, they just came up with a new process that did work.

As I said, it's speculation.

Another option is of course "I perfectly know, but I cannot tell you, because if I did, we'd be in legal trouble".

[tvphan]

They probably just poured more iron into their recipe?

[duxup]

I think the person giving the interview didn't know or just didn't want to say.

[HarryHirsch]

Complete failure in acceptance testing, most likely. Someone did an Annie Dookhan there.