Nutrition labelling – Seven secrets for successful food labelling
- posted in: Blog
Nutrition labelling comes into force 2016. See below for why you need to do it and how NIS can help.
Seven secrets for successful food labelling to meet the new regulations
1. You must display the nutrients shown below on your packaging from the 14 December 2016
2. The minimum font size for your nutrition label should be 1.2mm as shown below
3. If you are a small producer of pre-packed food you are not exempt unless quantities are small and only supplied locally. If you have a website shop this is not local!
However some foods are exempt from mandatory nutrient declaration e.g. unprocessed foods that comprise a single ingredient
4. The costs of getting your labelling wrong are far greater than the costs of getting it right – make sure you see the risks ahead clearly. Get NIS experts to independently calculate and certify your data.
5. Vitamins and minerals can be labelled, but only if they are present in significant quantities (7.5-15% of the nutrient reference value depending on the product)
6. Why bother with traffic light labels?
- 59% of consumers now examine labels for nutrition information
- Recent research indicates 22% of healthier symbol additions to packaging have a positive effect on product sales
- They aren’t designed to demonise foods but to let the consumer consider what they eat
- As increased use of traffic lights become popular, those products without may become mistrusted by the consumer
- Positive health label impact is more frequent in more indulgent products
- You have the option to print the traffic light label without the red, amber and green colours. For indulgent products this could give you a competitive advantage
Optional traffic light label without colours;
7. Seven ingredient facts that affect nutrition data you may not know…
- Tolerances are allowed for nutrition labelling purposes due to natural variations and variations from production and during storage, for example a food containing 10-40g of fat is allowed a labelling tolerance of ±20%
- Vinegar contains acetic acid which contributes towards the energy value
- Nutrition data may be different in 100g and 100ml of the same product. For example in ice-cream, whipping it with air will make the product less dense.
- When calculating nutrition data we always consider the type of butter you use. Salted butter may make a significant difference to the salt content.
- Most generic ‘vegetable oils’ are rapeseed oil
- Dried apricots sold as ready to eat are partially rehydrated so will contain more water than documented in dried apricot available in some datasets
- Bicarbonate of Soda contains 27.4g of sodium per 100g which would be equivalent to 68.5g salt according to labelling regulations
We supply nutritional information for your labels from £25 per product (plus VAT) just from your product recipe. You print your labels and packaging knowing you are compliant.
Check out our new website and use our discount code before the end of May 2016 to obtain every fifth product recipe for free;