Gluten-Free Water

Walk down any Australian supermarket aisle and you’ll find some remarkable claims.

GMO-free popcorn. GMO-free salt. Cholesterol-free vegetable oil. Gluten-free bottled water. Gluten-free rice. Preservative-free honey. Dairy-free coconut milk. Fat-free sugar.

Every one of them is true. None of them tells you anything.

There’s no genetically modified popcorn on the market. Salt is a mineral, so it has no genes to modify. Cholesterol comes from animals, so no vegetable oil has ever contained it. Water has no gluten. Rice has no gluten. Honey keeps for years without help. Coconuts have never been dairy. Sugar is sugar.

And hormone-free chicken? Hormone growth promotants haven’t been used in Australian chicken meat for decades. Every chicken in the fridge is hormone-free. Only some of them say so.

So why put it on the label? Because the label isn’t really making a claim about this product. It’s making an insinuation about the one next to it. When one packet says “gluten-free water”, you start to wonder about the water that doesn’t. The sentence is true. The impression it creates is where the persuasion happens.

This is an old trick. In the early 1900s, the advertising pioneer Claude Hopkins toured the Schlitz brewery and was struck by its process: filtered water, bottles washed with live steam. The brewers shrugged. Every brewery did that. Hopkins wrote the ads anyway. Schlitz was the only one saying it, so the public assumed Schlitz was the only one doing it. Its sales rose sharply.

Australian regulators have noticed. In 2004, the ACCC had a major poultry producer relabel chicken marked “not genetically modified”. The birds weren’t GM. But their feed might have been, and the label invited shoppers to assume otherwise. The ACCC’s line was simple: a claim can be technically true and still misleading. Free has to mean free.

I see the same thing in business all the time. A bank promises your money is safe. An airline says it puts safety first. A consultancy says it’s committed to quality. Those aren’t differences, they’re the minimum. Presenting the price of entry as a selling point works for a while, until a customer notices that everyone says it.

It works the other way too. If your competitors are all making empty claims, the most persuasive thing you can do is say something specific that only you can say. “Gluten-free water” is easy to write. “We answer the phone in under a minute, and here’s last month’s average” takes effort, and that’s why people believe it.

So read the label, then ask the question it’s hoping you won’t: compared to what?