EU Directive 1169/2011 enters into full force on 13 December 2016. The first stage of this directive came into force in 2014 on December 13, and the second - nutrition data, in which the question of how to calculate nutrition data begins.
At the first stage of this rule, it was required that all ingredients on the labels contain information on allergens in the list of ingredients. Prior to this rule it was legally acceptable to include information on allergies in a separate area of your label.
New rules simply require that allergens be highlighted in the same ingredient list for a product, but the ingredients must also be quantified.
Quantitative order simply means that the largest component should be listed first, then second largest, etc. The percentages of these ingredients should also be included.
There are several ways to isolate ingredients; Users can use bold text with text color text or italic text.
There are 14 allergens that must be indicated when labeling, if they are present in the ingredients of the product. These include wheat or oats, or any other flakes containing gluten, and also include milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, to name a few.
Another aspect of the legislation was the harmonization of text clarity on food labels.
Historically, the text can be incredibly difficult to read, as manufacturers fill in as much information as possible as a small part of the label to maximize the marketing potential of the rest of the label.
New rules require that all text be legal with a specific height of the letter “x” in a font of at least 1.2 millimeters. In layman's terms, this means that the standard font Arial or Times New Roman should be 6.5 points and size.
The second phase of the rules, which came into force in December of this year, requires that nutrition data be supplied with all pre-packaged foods so that consumers can make choices regarding nutrition within the products they buy.
The law provides that this information should be transferred to the client for 100 grams.
In addition, you can transfer information additionally per serving, so that, for example, a sandwich will install a service so that the food manufacturer can provide information based on the entire sandwich. The food manufacturer may also indicate the nutritional values in the serving, such as cookies or a small piece of chocolate. But the food manufacturer should also provide information in 100 g format in all cases.
How to calculate nutrition data
To calculate the nutritional values of packaged products for sale to public food production, enterprises need to know the nutritional values for the constituent ingredients in their product. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how to calculate nutritional data is to give an example; ham and mustard sandwich.
A ham and mustard sandwich can consist of four ingredients; we will have bread, ham, mustard, margarine or butter to make a sandwich. Each of these ingredients will be included along the recipe line; that is, there will be a certain weight of each product to make up a standard product.
Food manufacturers should start with the basic nutritional data for each of the ingredients - as stated, legislation requires that nutritional data be provided per 100 grams. Since all manufacturers must do this, most food companies should be able to obtain this information directly from the packaging of the products they buy or by talking to their supplier.
In our example, the food manufacturer may collect data from the ingredients in a table. The information to be transmitted includes energy in both kilojoules and kilocalories; they must also transfer total fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar, protein, and salt — all in grams.
Food manufacturers can also specify mono-unsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fats, polyols, and starch (which are carbohydrates) and fiber, if they want to.
The order of nutrients is specific and must be observed in accordance with the rules.
Once the data table has been prepared for 100 grams for all ingredients, the food manufacturer must understand the weight of each product used in the recipe to make a sandwich. In this example, the food producer should know the weight of two pieces of bread (even 60 grams), the ham they use (for example, 30 grams), 10 grams of mustard 5 grams of margarine.
Once this has been done, a simple calculation is applied to each of the ingredients to determine how many calories, how much fat, saturated fat, etc. Present in the recipe. The calculation will be to divide the data into 100 g of nutrition per 100, and then multiply by the weight of this component in the ingredient.
For example, if 100 grams of ham is 350 calories, the division per 100 is 3.5 calories per gram. 3.5 calories per gram x 30 grams used in the recipe is 105 calories.
Once this is completed, the food producer will have an accurate indication of the total nutritional data for the ham and mustard sandwich, simply adding the values for each component ingredient together as a total for the recipe.
And here is how to calculate nutrition data using Microsoft Excel or Open Office Calc.
Currently, food manufacturers in the UK face a huge challenge in achieving the goals set out in the rules, and they need to be resolved very quickly if they have not been.
