Sounds like a pretty clever startup idea. Consumer Reports, but for everything. Then a seal that manufacturers can put on their product that certifies the assay of ingredients. Does a Coke actually have 120 calories? Is a Vitamin actually what it says? Is the bottle actually recycled? Consumer Reports is often opinion based with some quantitative data and they don’t review everything. Is you olive oil actually from Italian olives? Are those organic pears actually organic? Products that get “the seal” can market that fact. And if consumers care enough, they’ll pick products that are certified to be what they say they are. If I am buying high end paint, the water content matters to me for example.
The FDA should really focus entirely on consumer safety only. (It’s not a safety issue if your olive oil is Moroccan rather than Spanish or whatever.) And the FDA doesn’t have any mission to test if that 18/10 stainless steel sink is actually 18/10 stainless for example.
Selling something that is not what you say it is is false advertising, and falls under the purview of the FTC. Unfortunately, the testing, enforcement, and penalties are all extremely weak.
Trust in the marketplace is a very valuable asset, one that cannot be bought. It has to be cultivated and maintained over many, many years, and having the government do that makes perfect sense as it is a societal benefit.
We need a UL/Consumer Reports for Internet-connected devices that documents and certifies their use of personal data and bandwidth. The regulators are not going to be able to keep up with the changes.
Computer component manufacturers have already caught on. New products are built to spec and then later on in that product's manufacturing life cycle, the parts it's built with are changed to reduce cost but the SKU is kept the same.
The FDA should really focus entirely on consumer safety only. (It’s not a safety issue if your olive oil is Moroccan rather than Spanish or whatever.) And the FDA doesn’t have any mission to test if that 18/10 stainless steel sink is actually 18/10 stainless for example.