You've spent countless hours using the best ingredients to create your food or beverage. But, before it's ready to hit the shelves, there's one detail you can't forget to add. Nutrition labels. More and more, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is requiring small businesses to provide nutritional information on its packaging. We can help you tackle this major step for your business by providing resources you can use to get your products on the shelf!
How exactly do all of these large companies figure out their nutrition facts? Can a small business access these resources? There are actually several options for small food and beverage manufacturers to get their products analyzed. Below are some of the most popular resources.
Send your Product to a Lab for a Thorough Analysis
Foods that are fried, coated, or salted must have their nutritional information determined by a lab because of their complexity. Since foods being analyzed in an official lab must follow strict procedures according to the FDA, the process can be both time consuming and expensive.
Examples of Product Labs:
- http://www.foodlab.com/
- http://www.nutridata.com/
- http://www.nutrilabel.com/
- http://www.nutritionfoodlabels.com/
Food labs such as these use their extensive database and food science experience to calculate accurate nutrition facts for consumers. The information they provide is based on the nutrition facts of each contributing ingredient and the percentage used in your recipe. These nutrition facts are tallied based on your processing procedures, allowing them to create an accurate assessment for the nutrition facts of your finished product. If your recipe information is unavailable, they will generally use a more thorough label analysis.
Use a Nutritional Database
Another popular option for smaller businesses and individuals is to use nutritional database sites. Resources like the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference are popular in determining nutrition facts because the information is free and readily available. You can find nutrition information on over 8,000 foods and ingredients and it is searchable by food item, group or description. This database contains complete analysis on a wide variety of ingredients, however, some items are still unable to be analyzed with this tool. There are quite a few other sites that allow you to enter in a particular ingredient and serving size to find out specific nutrition facts.
Examples of Nutritional Database Services:
Does the FDA Have to Approve the Panels?
Here’s the easy answer:
No. The FDA does not regulate nutrition fact panels on a proactive basis.
Let's break it down a bit further. The FDA provides information on standards they set forth, and recommends these nutrition fact guidelines are followed. Should the FDA find a business or individual is incorrectly or improperly reporting nutritional facts on their food labels, they will issue a recall. In order to avoid the frustrating and expensive "Spot Check" by the FDA, it's critical to accurately report and display your nutrition facts. You can find information related to food labeling guidelines and compliance directly from the FDA on their website.
If you're still uncertain or just don't have the time to spend doing it yourself, think about hiring an FDA approved label consultant. An FDA label consultant will ensure you are providing the most accurate information on your product labels.
Examples of Food Label Consultants:
Create A Nutrition Label For Your Product
One of the easiest and cheapest ways to create your nutrition labels after you have received your information is with a generator. You can use OnlineLabels.com's free nutrition label generatorand choose between three layouts: basic, vertical, or horizontal. Then, it's as easy as entering in your product's nutrition facts! Save your label to your computer or straight on OnlineLabels.com, choose the matching label size, and print it out at home or the office. Seriously, that's all there is to it!
Sincerely
Rozzy
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