The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a tight leash on food and beverage labeling standards. Regulations are prone to change and become more stringent to avoid misinformation and misrepresentation of facts on labels.
To top this, customers are demanding labels that help them understand what they’re consuming to help them manage their health and wellness goals. And according to a study, 86% of consumers wanted retailers to go above and beyond federal regulations to improve ingredient clarity.
That’s why ensuring accuracy in labeling has become more important than ever. But it’s not easy for industries to satisfy consumer and federal demands when it comes to labeling so in this guide, we’ll discuss:
The FDA made changes to Nutrition Label Facts on packaged drinks and food in 2022 based on scientific research and inputs from consumers. This is the first major update in 20 years and will help consumers make informed food choices to support a healthy lifestyle. Here are some of the major changes to nutritional labels:
Serving sizes or servings per container have been updated to better reflect the amount people typically eat and drink today. For example, the serving size of ice cream was ½ cup in 1993, but today, it’s ⅔ cup.
The font size for servings per container have also increased to highlight the information.
“Calories” is now in a bigger font to ensure that consumers can find the information easily.
What's considered to be a"services" has changedfor some foods in the decades sicne the original Nurtrition facts label was created. so, some serving sizes were updated to more relalitically relfect how much people typicallyeat at one time.
Package size often affects, both 12-ounce and 20-ounce bottleswill be labeled as one service, since people are likely to drink the entire amount in either size container on sitting.
Source: FDA Gov
💡 Apart from the recent change to nutritional labels, the FDA also added sesame to its list of major food allergens. Companies have until 2023 to make these changes and update their labels.
The changes discussed above may seem minor but failure to update labels can result in major consequences like product recalls and fines. Here are some major FDA recalls that took place because brands didn’t declare allergen information or were mislabeled.
Food labeling regulations are subject to sudden change and severe scrutiny by the FDA. So, various stakeholders in the supply chain need to quickly adapt to these changes to avoid product launch delays and secure market share before their competitors. But this is easier said than done because of the following labeling challenges.
very label goes through several revisions from different cross-functional teams (Legal, Marketing/Branding, Design) to make sure they meet FDA standards and live up to customer expectations.
However, keeping track of these revisions and changes quickly spirals out of control as companies use generic tools like Google Drive, emails, and chat applications to receive feedback.
The endless chain of communication makes it impossible to maintain audit trails, assign tasks, and find artwork-related messages easily. As a result, your brand may face launch delays and even lose revenue.
Making labeling changes based on regulations isn’t easy. You’ve to go through the review and approval process again and there’s a high chance that reviewers let a few changes slip through the cracks.
Plus, many companies still send hard copies of printed labels to various teams. So, tracking version changes and tracing which team member made the changes is also difficult and increases risks of non-compliance. Ultimately, these factors affect the bottom line of the company, thanks to the delayed time to market.
Acompany that simultaneously creates a lot of artwork for different products indifferent languages is prone to be affected by launch delays if they can’t keepup with the volume of changes.
For example, Lesser Evil, an American snack brand and Artwork Flow customer, had to expand their product line quickly because more people started snacking during the pandemic. Their team had to approve 40-50 artworks every month and often, the same team would be involved in approving multiple projects, leading to mis communication and confusion.
Also, the project managers had a hard time combing through their assets to find the latest Artwork version that had to be sent to printing companies. They did eventually solve this problem — here’s how.
When proofing an artwork, it’s easy to miss inconsistencies like font size, font type, brand colors, and more, and have a blind spot for grammatical inaccuracies.
However, missing these factors damages brand reputation as it leaves room for the creation of counterfeit products and leads to compliance issues. It also leads to increased printing costs as you’ll have to reprint labels.
We looked at the labeling challenges the food and beverage industry faces on a regular basis earlier. Now, let’s look at how an intelligent label management system can solve these challenges, streamline the approval process, and reduce product launch delays.
Now that we’ve understood how an intelligent label management system helps cut down unnecessary costs and scale your revenue, let’s look at what features you should look for while choosing an intelligent label management system.
Next, let’s look at an intelligent label management tool that offers you all these features and more to help you stay compliant and reduce your launch delays.
Artwork Flow streamlines the entire artwork and label management process. From the early concept stage to the ready to publish stage, the software has built-in features to help you launch products on time without the risks of product recalls.
The most beneficial one for food and beverage industries is called the “smart proofing feature.” It helps our users check their labels for compliance against FSSAI & FDA regulations based on 5 factors with the help of AI models. This tool is available for free on our website to help you enable faster approvals and remain compliant with regulations.
Here are other ways you can use Artwork Flow to streamline label management in the food and beverage industry:
And if you want to streamline your approval process and eliminate launch delays, contact us right away for a free demo and we’ll show you how Artwork Flow helps you achieve these results.