Simon Houpt

From Friday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Friday, Oct. 02, 2009 07:45AM EDT

Noted: Food Fight

Cleanup in aisle six: There's some mudslinging by the fruit snacks! Sun-Rype, the Kelowna, B.C.-based snack and juice producer that prides itself on using all-natural ingredients, is picking a fight with the manufacturers of fruity treats like Fruit Roll-Ups and Fruit Gushers that are laden with all sorts of unpronounceable ingredients.

The website findoutnow.ca shows an eerie laboratory table loaded with chemical vials containing ingredients alleged to be used in kids' snacks, like methyl paraben and the white liquid silicone known as dimethylpolysiloxane. In a handful of videos on the site, moms – or, at least, actors pretending to be moms – are filmed rolling their eyes and recoiling as they read aloud the ingredients. (“Sugar … sugar … sugar … carrageenan … hydrogenated cottonseed oil … carnuba wax – don't they use that on surfboards?”) The campaign comes at the same time the U.S. corn syrup lobby is launching a multimillion-dollar effort to counter the smears to its own reputation suffered at the hands of Big Sugar. There's only one sure thing: this whole sweets spat is going to get a lot stickier before it's over.