The power of marketing 2: Cookies

I posted about how I was tricked into buying Haagen Dazs Five ice cream thinking it was a better product. Besides the ice cream, another product I grabbed off the shelf was Pillsbury Simply Cookies. I was making "homemade" ice cream sandwiches and in order to cut corners decided not to make cookies from scratch.

I am a sucker for the word Simple. Simple is such a great word. When you hear simple you think less processed, easy, traditional, understandable; at least I do. And I will be persuaded to buy food items with the word simple/simply on the package maybe even more than I am swayed by organic.

So I bought the Simply Cookies again without looking at ingredients. But of course I cannot resist looking for long. So when I got home I had to take a look. Here are a list of ingredients in the peanut butter flavored Simply cookies:

Brown sugar, enriched wheat flour bleached, vegetable oil (palm and canola), Peanut Butter (peanuts, dextrose, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, salt), Water. Contains 2% or less of: Eggs, Baking Powder (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate), Salt, Skim milk, Vanilla Extract.

Overall, not the worst ingredient list I have seen. Although it could be better. The number of ingredients is not terrible, but I am sure that the source of those ingredients are not ideal. The flour is bleached, the eggs are probably pasteurized from chickens growing in not the greatest conditions, the peanut butter has trans fat.

And how easy would have been for me to make cookies from scratch? It would have been...simple.