Under the mandated changes to the Nutrition Facts Label recently announced by the FDA, food manufacturers will have to adhere to new requirements that aim to make the consumer feel more informed and allow them to better understand exactly what they are consuming. Two primary changes are the inclusion of “added sugars” and the re-proportioning of serving sizes.
Added Sugars
Added sugars will certainly feel the impact of the FDA’s new labeling regulations. More emphasis on highlighting added sugars means more pressure on food manufacturers to decrease added sugars in their recipes. This calls for new formulations to be tested by production and a potential overall transition from an original recipe to a new ‘reduced sugar’ version. Tests must be conducted and observations need to be recorded. Then, department members from Procurement, R&D, Quality, and Production should all collaborate to analyze the product reformulation and its affiliated data. Centralizing the results in order for the information to be shared across the entire organization will make this project must easier for all teams through the transition.
Serving Sizes
20 oz. bottled beverages will no longer show nutritional info based off of 2.5 servings per bottle. Instead, it will reflect nutritional info for the full 20 oz. serving, since consumption of the entire bottle has become the standard. This alleviates the burden on the consumer to do the math in order to calculate true consumption. However, the manufacturers will now have to make substantial adjustments to production and labeling, which may ultimately force some manufacturers to alter formulas or packaging, in addition to the updates for the Nutrition Facts Label for the product.
With the added stressors of the new regulations and their resulting implications for food manufacturers, it is more important than ever to have an ERP system that can support experimental recipe development and ingredients, allow searches of historical formulations, and centralize data across departments. Foodmanufacturing.com notes that “Food manufacturers are turning to database systems that have the ability and capacity to consistently and accurately process billions of information objects.” Vicinity’s food manufacturing software can do just that.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a final rule which extends the compliance date for manufacturers with $10 million or more in annual food sales from July 26, 2018, to January 1, 2020, and for manufacturers with less than $10 million in annual food sales from July 26, 2019 to January 1, 2021. However, it’s never too early to upgrade your ERP software to provide your company with the best tools possible for this upcoming project and any future challenges.