Walmart Shopper Picks Up Great Value Oatmeal and Notices One Major Issue: ‘It Doesn’t Have...’

Zip through a grocery aisle and you’ll be welcomed with hoards of cereal boxes that prompt you to slow down your rolling cart and pause, so you can pay attention at their eye-catching packaging. The seductive pull enchants you with its graphic design, typography, hot-stamped foil stickers, or maybe a tantalizing product description too. Somewhere between the swarm of these advertising elements, hides a little square, whose tiny black font spells out a mathematical list called “Nutrition Facts,” that many people avoid reading. But being a food influencer, Paden Ferguson (@padiano) took his time to carefully read this square before making a purchase.

While perusing an aisle of cereal boxes at Walmart, Ferguson put his hands on some Great Value cereals, and was instantly jolted into a puzzling and rude awakening. The mismatch between front-of-package labels with the back side labels left him disoriented and duped. “Hey Walmart, you good,” he captioned the video. The video starts with Ferguson strolling inside a supermarket, walking among the cereal aisles.

“You are not gonna believe this,” he told his viewers. He stopped in front of an aisle and picked up a pink-colored box of Great Value Strawberries & Cream Instant Oatmeal. He flipped the box to reveal the list of ingredients and nutritional information on the back side. “These strawberries and cream instant oatmeal don't have any strawberries in them,” he complained. He then put his hand on the box sitting next to the pink box. This was Great Value’s Peaches & Cream Instant Oatmeal. Again, he flipped the orange box. At the back, a list of ingredients showed that the product didn’t contain “peaches,” but rather, “peach flavored fruit pieces (apples).”

“The peaches and cream oatmeal doesn't have any peaches in it. It's peach flavored apple pieces. I guess there's at least peach juice in that,” ranted the man from Oklahoma. Disappointed by the discovery, the man then shifted his attention to the Lemon Crème flavor of the oatmeal. “But the lemon cream oatmeal that's right next to it doesn't have any freaking lemon in it,” he revealed. Ferguson then moved on to another aisle, this one stocked with Quaker cereal boxes. Picking up one of the boxes and flipping it to the back, he said, “I'm not a huge fan of Quaker, at least their strawberries and cream oatmeal has strawberries in it. How is that not false advertising?”

Puzzled by the discrepancy of the ingredients and the overhyped advertising, he added this message on the video overlay in bold letters, “This feels deceptive.” His video, viewed by millions of people, sparked a tirade of conspiracy theories about packaged food and advertising labels. “Go check juices, most of them are actually apple with some flavouring,” commented @michael_c4. @brian said, “Wait this actually is illegal. They cannot use real strawberries on the packaging if there are not strawberries in the product.”

Sharing a similar experience, @dee said, “I recently noticed some blueberry bagels are just cranberries soaked in blueberry concentrate.” Another TikTok user thanked Ferguson for the eye-opening video, as they wouldn’t have bothered to check the labels while buying cereal. In response, Ferguson urged them to make a habit of checking these labels because “there’s a ton of stuff you wouldn’t expect.” Explaining his thinking behind this, he told The Daily Dot, “As a food manufacturer myself, I understand using a variety of ingredients to achieve a specific flavor. However, if you are going to call something Strawberries and Cream, then you should have strawberries in it. Or at the very least, a disclosure stating ‘imitation strawberry pieces’ like they do on their blueberry pancakes.”

You can follow Paden Ferguson (@padiano) on TikTok for food-related content.