They say “contains less than 0.5%” because that’s the cutoff that makes something legally beer. It more than likely has none, much of the time. That’s just the law (US):
> 0.5% it’s beer and subject to alcohol laws
< 0.5% it’s not beer, technically a food
So they label it as <0.5% simply to show that it’s in the latter category. This creates a lot of confusion for some reason.
Even the grocers (and even manufacturers) get it all messed up. Hell, half the brands don’t have required nutritional info (beer doesn’t need it, soda does) but the real problem is that:
The regulatory agencies are captured and don’t do shit anymore. TECHNICALLY the FDA should be stepping in and making them put full nutritional information on all the brands of NA “beer” and making sure it is labeled and sold like a soda.
But the larger companies that sell it are just misclassifying it and creating problems to be as lazy and risk avoidant as possible.
They say “contains less than 0.5%” because that’s the cutoff that makes something legally beer. It more than likely has none, much of the time. That’s just the law (US):
> 0.5% it’s beer and subject to alcohol laws
< 0.5% it’s not beer, technically a food
So they label it as <0.5% simply to show that it’s in the latter category. This creates a lot of confusion for some reason.
Even the grocers (and even manufacturers) get it all messed up. Hell, half the brands don’t have required nutritional info (beer doesn’t need it, soda does) but the real problem is that:
The regulatory agencies are captured and don’t do shit anymore. TECHNICALLY the FDA should be stepping in and making them put full nutritional information on all the brands of NA “beer” and making sure it is labeled and sold like a soda.
But the larger companies that sell it are just misclassifying it and creating problems to be as lazy and risk avoidant as possible.