Recently, new regulations on labeling products as "gluten-free" were issued in Brussels for food manufacturing in the EU. According to an article entitled EU Publishes New Rules for 'Gluten Free' Foods, "Under the new European Union regulations, only foods that contain less than 20 parts of gluten in a million will be allowed to use the term 'gluten-free' on their packaging. Recent evidence has shown that this extremely low level offers better protection for people with an intolerance to gluten. Previously, a food labelled ‘gluten free’ could have contained up to ten times more than this. "
Foodnavigator.com presents some reaction to the new regulations already in New gluten-free labelling could mean extra costs for bakers. The article states that "Adoption of the European regulation may require some re-labelling of products, and consequently some costs to business. The claims which this regulation controls are voluntary claims in order to allow manufacturers to clearly highlight one particular property of their product to the consumer." Product reformulation to meet the new regulations is also anticipated.
Installation of similar regulations for gluten and the top food allergens would be a welcome change to U.S. labeling laws (and perhaps in Canada, too). What do you think?
1 comment:
As a mom of a mustard seed and peanut allergic daughter I would be thrilled to see the European allergens(which include mustard seed) listed on the USA packages. Being the progressive country I find it rather odd and sad that it takes a village to convince those in charge that the Major Allergens should be across the board unifified etc no matter what the country. We are all the same. It was my hope that this would be done already but perhaps with wonderful websites like this helping to spread the word that the minor inconvenience of redoing package labels(something that appears to be done quite frequently for advertisement etc purposes) may save countless heartache and pain for allergic individuals. Thanks for listening.
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