A quick grocery run for vanilla turned into a mini investigation when a Walmart shopper flipped over a bottle of Great Value vanilla extract and spotted an ingredient she felt had “no purpose” in a baking staple. Her frustration, shared on TikTok, tapped into a bigger question home bakers keep circling: what exactly are we paying for when we grab the cheapest bottle on the shelf, and how much extra stuff is hiding behind that cozy “vanilla” label?
Instead of shrugging it off, the shopper’s video helped crystallize a growing unease around food dyes, flavor shortcuts, and the gap between what shoppers think they are buying and what the fine print actually delivers. It also landed right as Walmart is trying to clean up its private labels, putting Great Value and its vanilla offerings under a brighter spotlight than a simple cookie recipe would normally warrant.
What the shopper actually found in that Great Value bottle
The drama started in a Walmart baking aisle, where a creator named Jan picked up a Great Value vanilla extract, tossed it in her cart, and only later turned the bottle around. On the back, the ingredient list did not read like the classic trio bakers expect. Instead, it listed water, alcohol, propylene glycol, artificial flavour, tartrazine, amaranth, and a note that the product was made for Canada. For a lot of shoppers, that is already a curveball, because they assume “vanilla extract” means vanilla beans, alcohol, and not much else.
Jan’s frustration zeroed in on the color additives. She pointed out that unless you turn the bottle around, you would never know the flavor is backed up by tartrazine and amaranth, two synthetic dyes that she argued have “no purpose” in something that is usually measured by the teaspoon and baked into batter. Her complaint was not just that there were color additives, but which ones, since she described them as “the bad food coloring” and said that once she noticed them she could not unsee it and would not buy this Ingredients list again.
Another TikTok creator, Maggie, who posts as @chronicpaincatholic, echoed that sense of betrayal in a short video that walked viewers through the same label. She highlighted the same mix of water, alcohol, propylene glycol, artificial flavour, tartrazine, and amaranth, and then contrasted it with what she thought vanilla extract should be. That sense of unease, she said, made her feel like she could not trust the brand and led her to say she would not buy this Maggie bottle anymore.
What “real” vanilla extract looks like, and why labels are so confusing
Part of why the Walmart bottle hit a nerve is that there is a pretty clear legal picture of what pure vanilla extract is supposed to be. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has a Standard of Identity that spells out how much vanilla bean and alcohol must be in a product before it can be called pure vanilla extract. Industry experts note that Vanilla Extracts contain 35% alcohol by law as per the Standard of Identity, while Vanilla FLAVOR does not contain alcohol and instead leans on carriers like propylene glycol, which is exactly what showed up on the Walmart label that Jan and Maggie were dissecting.
Compare that to a straightforward bottle of Great Value pure vanilla extract sold in the United States, where the listed Ingredients are simply vanilla bean extractives in water and alcohol, with the alcohol content specified at 41%. That cleaner formula lines up with what home bakers in online communities say they expect. In one Facebook baking group, a commenter identified as Jacquie George the pointed out that the pure vanilla extract is just vanilla bean extractives, alcohol, and water, and added that the picture in the original post was a blend, not the simple version many people assume they are getting, a distinction that she emphasized with a blunt “However.”
The confusion is not just about ingredients, it is also about marketing. Lawyers who track food labeling note that vanilla flavor litigation often turns on the same basic premise: a label suggests a product is vanilla flavored, but the taste actually comes from non vanilla flavors or additives, which can create legal risk for the product manufacturer. When shoppers like Jan and Maggie see propylene glycol, artificial flavour, tartrazine, and amaranth on the back of a bottle that leans heavily on the word “vanilla” on the front, it plugs right into those long running fights over what counts as honest labeling.
Walmart’s dye problem collides with a bigger cleanup effort
The timing of this vanilla dust up is awkward for Walmart, because the retailer has already promised to phase synthetic dyes out of its private brands. Earlier in the fall, the company said that its private brand food items, including Great Value, Marketside, Freshness Guaranteed, and bettergoods, would be reformulated to be free of synthetic dyes and preservatives, and that thirty other ingredients would be removed or replaced with what it called “safer and more natural substitutes,” a pledge laid out in a detailed Great Value roadmap. Company leaders said shoppers would start to see the changes roll out over the next year or so, which means some bottles on shelves will still carry the older formulas that TikTok users are now dragging.
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