Costco bagel blueberry claim goes viral

A viral video accusing Costco’s blueberry bagels of using “simulated blueberries” instead of fruit pushed a routine ingredient label into a national social-media argument. (tiktok.com) The clip was posted by dietitian Nazima Qureshi on TikTok and had 32,700 likes and 709 comments when it was crawled on April 12, 2026. A separate repost on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, helped spread the claim further. (tiktok.com) The central claim is not that the bagels were mislabeled on the package, but that shoppers expected real blueberries and instead found an ingredient description for imitation fruit pieces. Costco’s own same-day product pages warn that online packaging details “may not be current or complete” and tell shoppers to rely on the physical product. (costco.com) Federal rules do not require the Food and Drug Administration to pre-approve ordinary food labels before sale. The agency says manufacturers are responsible for making sure foods sold in the United States are “properly labeled.” (fda.gov) Those rules also define terms such as “artificial flavor” and “artificial color,” which are the kinds of ingredients consumers look for when they are trying to tell real fruit from fruit-flavored pieces. The current electronic Code of Federal Regulations says artificial flavor is a flavor not derived from fruit or other named natural sources, and artificial color is any added color additive. (ecfr.gov) Imitation blueberries are not new. Costco fan sites were describing “Kirkland Signature Imitation Blueberry Bagels” as far back as January 2019, and older food-label investigations found many blueberry foods used sugar, corn syrup, starch, oil, flavoring and dye in place of whole berries. (costcuisine.com) (wku.edu) That history helps explain why the post traveled so fast: it tapped into a long-running consumer complaint about front-of-package expectations versus back-of-package ingredient lists. The Food and Drug Administration’s labeling guide says ingredient statements must list components in descending order of predominance by weight, which is where shoppers usually discover whether a fruit product contains fruit pieces, flavoring, or both. (fda.gov) Costco’s publicly available same-day pages currently show bakery bagels in plain and everything varieties, but they do not provide a current blueberry-bagel ingredient panel online. That means the argument now rests less on a hidden ingredient than on a familiar grocery-store lesson: the package name and the ingredient list are not always saying the same thing. (costco.com 1) (costco.com 2)