You’ve invested your time, resources, and effort into creating a specialty food or beverage product and now you would like to share the fruits of your labor with the world. There are many important factors that can help market and sell your product, but there is only one component that you MUST include – the FDA Nutrition Facts Label. A quick internet search will yield no less than a dozen do-it-yourself services to create your own nutrition label, so why should you have someone else help with this service?
Do-it-yourself Nutrition Labeling
Most do-it-yourself nutrition labeling software relies on food and ingredient data found in nutritional databases. The process is straightforward – you input your ingredients and serving size information and you will receive the nutritional facts for the product. However, not all databases are created equal. Some may have incomplete information or be missing ingredient information altogether. It can be easy to overlook small details about the process used in creating your product that can change the nutritional composition of your product.
Even if you are able to obtain accurate nutritional facts from an online software database, FDA compliant nutrition labels must meet rigid and ever-changing style guidelines. Minor stylistic errors such as incorrect font size and placing information in the wrong order on the label can cause it to fall out of FDA compliance.
There are also many food and beverage products that go through different processes during their creation that will require full laboratory nutritional analysis. If your product is dehydrated, brewed, filtered, fermented, pickled, or brined it will require nutrition analysis that can only be performed through professional laboratory testing. Nutritional analysis may also be needed if your recipe contains ingredients for which you can’t find all the nutrient values in an existing database.
Risk of Non-Compliant Labels
The FDA’s primary interest is the protection of public health. As such, their primary job is to ensure that the information presented to the public is accurate. They will not hesitate to investigate even the smallest start-up or retail order to ensure compliance. If a nutritional label is found to be false or non-compliant the product will likely be recalled. The average product recall costs food entrepreneurs millions of dollars in lost revenue, fines from retailers, labor costs and other charges.
The RL Food Testing Difference
With RL Food Testing, you will receive top-rate customer service that will walk you through the entire process needed to get your product ready to sell. Using online software has limitations. The validity of your label will only be as good as the information you provide and the depth of knowledge within the database. We utilize an FDA-approved database containing the nutrition information for thousands of different ingredients. You will also get the added benefit of a dedicated representative who will help catch those “little” things you may have overlooked if doing it alone.
Laboratory analysis is available for products that have ingredients with nutritional information not available in the database or those that utilize specialized food processing techniques. Our label technicians undergo hours of training to ensure the resulting nutritional facts are accurate and compliant with the most up-to-date FDA regulations.
Obtaining an FDA compliant nutritional label in an investment in your products success. Just as you would look for the best ingredients to complete your recipe, you should trust an industry leader to help you with this process.
