Food shopping on a budget? Look no further than Walmart’s Great Value brand, which promises quality ingredients at a lower price. Regular customers know the store’s generic brand is the holy grail of massive savings on grocery staples, including canned veggies, frozen fruit, deli meat, sweet treats, and more. But a new nutritional label on certain cans of Great Value corn has some customers up in arms.
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Peggy Bolton is a Walmart patron and content creator who recently went viral on TikTok after pointing out several disparities between two cans of Golden Sweet Kernel Corn from Walmart.
Despite both variations containing the same exact ingredients (corn, water, and salt), one product is now labeled a product of Thailand. As Bolton indicated, this caused a change in nutrition facts and prompted Walmart to remove its “Great For You” stamp.
“The fact that so many of us have both cans of corn in our pantry says that this change happened pretty recently,” Bolton said in her video, which has more than 2.4 million views.
Comparing the two cans, Bolton noticed a spike in calories—which doubled from 45 to 90 calories per serving—and sugar, which tripled from two to six grams per serving. She explains how this is concerning because they have the same ingredients and the volume of corn also remains unchanged.
However, what really has Walmart shoppers in a tizzy is that the “product of Thailand” can now has the California warning label, whereas the old can does not.
According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), businesses are required to warn customers about products with “significant exposures to chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.”
Naturally, people are now worried about what exactly is going into Great Value’s products—and does it go beyond corn?
“Now it’s a product of Thailand, and what everybody’s talking about is the California warning label,” Bolton explained. “Every Great Value can that I went through, this [the warning label] is only on the corn that comes from Thailand.”
She added, “My best guess is that it’s coming from the pesticides used in Thailand.”
@peggybolton #GreatValue #Corn #Pesticides #CaliforniaWarning #CancerCausingwarning #Walmart
Whatever the reason may be, the label change also resulted in Walmart pulling its “Great For You” sticker. On its website, Walmart says, “The icon serves as a guide to help people make incremental changes to their diet by encouraging more nutritious food choices.”
By that logic, Bolton theorized that the new canned corn must not meet the health and safety requirements.
“They have the California cancer warning on there, so there’s that,” she stated. “You may want to check your corn.”
RELATED: Shoppers Claim Walmart Is Overcharging for Meat.
Nearly 4,000 people have left startling comments on Bolton’s TikTok post, with many pledging to discard their cans of Great Value corn.
“They straight up said this one is not great for you!” one person exclaimed. Meanwhile, someone else shared: “How I RAN to my pantry! I got the Thailand one.”
“I rarely buy canned goods anymore. I read the labels, ingredients and where they come from. It’s wild,” reads another comment.
Another commenter warned to look for other canned foods that may follow suit. “I think corn is just the tip of the iceberg. Other foods haven’t tasted right and it’s like my body is rejecting it.”
