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Letter: Letters: Tomato tile

Published 7 September 1991

From M. KENT

I would like to remove the ‘je ne sais quoi’ from your journalism. There
are several errors in your article on the Community Bureau of Reference
(BCR) programme (This Week, 17 August).

The tomato paste reference tile was asked for by the food industry for
reasons outlined in your article and was not ‘dreamed up’ by the BCR. This
was not for purely cosmetic reasons: tomato paste colour is an important
quality criterion.

The tile is not being distributed to manufacturers, it is being sold
on request, as are all reference materials produced under the BCR programme.

Colour reference tiles have been used for measurement of tomato paste
colour for many years, mostly produced in the US and conforming to US standards.
These are no longer available and it was felt that for several reasons concerned
with accurate measurement a uniformly coloured tile was required for Europe,
not as suggested, a series of different shades of red.

M. Kent Skene Aberdeenshire

Issue no. 1785 published 7 September 1991

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