Food labels provide information about the nutritional content inside a package of food. All food manufacturers are required by law to provide specific information about the food consumers are buying to help them make informed decisions. Correct product labeling is a major challenge for food producing companies. Things like legislation conformity, customer demands and industry-specific QUID rules have turned labeling into a complex procedure.
In a world where time is money, it is important to be able to generate correct product specifications in a quick and efficient way. This is where specialized labeling software comes in. The BESTMIX recipe management tool by Adifo Software supports food industry R&D departments, QA units and product managers from first concept to final specifications. Moreover, it helps them tackle all the difficulties they encounter with the labelling of food products.
Most common labeling issues and their solutions
Legislation
Food producers need to make sure that their product labels comply to the current legislation. Not only do they need to comply with the current legislation in force, but also to be flexible enough to comply to future legislations on time. Some legislations will only be small adaptations, but other changes have a huge impact on the existing way of labelling, as did the 1169/2011 regulation.
In these specific cases, food producers need to be able to fully trust on their labelling tool to provide the necessary functionalities to guide them towards compliance on time.
Customer demands
Food producers that produce under private label have to deal with additional requirements for the labelling of their clients’ products.
- Requirements regarding E-numbers, for example declaration of ‘E300’
- Customer A wants to see ‘Ascorbic acid’
- Customer B wants to see ‘E300’
- Customer C wants to see ‘Ascorbic acid (E300)’
This is a typical example of requirements for different declarations for the same ingredient.
BESTMIX Recipe management software offers the functionality to manage alternative declaration sets for each client as an overlay on the default declaration of the ingredient.
- Highlight allergens in de List of Ingredients: bold, uppercase, underlined, … Requests for different formatting of the highlighted parts are covered by using different specification templates where settings can be fixed per template.
Some examples of other settings that can be managed in these templates:
- List of ingredients in continuous text or in tabular form
- Printing of percentages limited to QUID rules only or print all percentages
- Rounding rules for percentages
- …
Multilingual labeling
For products that are distributed to different countries, specifications in multiple languages are required.
Within BESTMIX all descriptions with their translations are stored in central tables in the database. This makes it easy to manage and maintain all descriptions. Adaptations of translations only need to be done on one place and are then applied throughout the entire database up to the final product specification.
By using centralized translations, changes in recipes (for example replacing one ingredient by another) will no longer mean several hours of making new specifications in all the different languages. By a simple ‘push on the button’ a new version of the specification is generated using the data and descriptions of the underlying tables. Previous versions of specifications are stored in the archive.
Processing aids
Processing aids do not need to be declared in a consumer declaration (unless they contain allergens), but retailers often require full declaration with insight in these processing aids. Processing aids can be marked on 2 levels:
- They can be present in the ingredient bought from the supplier. In that case the producer needs to be able to mark a component as processing aid in the ingredient declaration (for example: anti-caking agent in salt)
- Or an ingredient can also be used in the recipe as a processing aid (for example: oil on a baking tray). In this case, it must be possible to mark an ingredient as processing aid in the recipe.
BESTMIX allows to fill in this information as complete as possible and makes it possible to choose if the user wants to compose a declaration with and/or without processing aids.
Industry-specific QUID rules: Meat declaration
Within BESTMIX, the CLITRAVI formula (The Liaison Centre for the Meat Processing Industry in the European Union) is incorporated.
This formula calculates the amount of meat to declare as well as the amount of excess fat and excess connective tissue. This calculation is done based on the protein, fat and collagen content per animal species. The maximum levels of fat and connective tissue for each animal species are set according to the commission directive 2001/101/EC.
The formula also takes into account mechanically separated meat type 3 and type 4. Type 3 can be added to the total ‘meat’ content (indicated as ‘of which xx % mechanically separated meat’). Type 4 will not be added to the total meat content, but declared separately.
The declaration can be composed as follows:
- In case the recipe contains meat and mechanically separated meat Type 3
- Ingredients: 50% pork meat (of which 25% mechanically separated pork meat), pork fat, pork connective tissue, spices (pepper)
- In case the recipe contains meat and mechanically separated meat of both type 3 and type 4
- Ingredients: 50% pork meat (of which 15% mechanically separated pork meat), pork fat, pork connective tissue, 12% mechanically separated pork, spices (pepper)
These are some common issues involving correct labeling that are completely covered by BESTMIX Recipe Management software. Do you have any labeling issues? Contact our Food Industry specialist for more information at kathleen.de.badrihaye@adifo.com