Food Labelling Ingredients
The law governs food labelling, and what can and cannot be included on a food label, this can make reading labels interesting and sometimes challenging. The Food Standards Agency provide a useful guide to labelling.
Ingredients lists, on food labels, provide useful information about what’s in your food. Most pre-packed foods must be labelled with their ingredients listed in descending order of their weight.
If an ingredient is mentioned in the name, such as chicken in ‘chicken pie’, or is shown on the label, the amount of that ingredient contained in the food must be given as a percentage. This allows you to compare similar products.
Single ingredient foods, for example cheese, sugar and butter, do not need to give a list of ingredients. Neither do alcoholic drinks (above 1.2% vol.).
Where an ingredient is made up of several other ingredients, all the individual ingredients, all these ingredients must usually be given on the label – for example, the ingredients of gravy used in sausages with gravy.
Allergens
There are also 14 allergens that must be lists on a label if the food contains them
The 14 foods are:
- celery
- cereals containing gluten (wheat, barley, rye and oats)
- crustaceans (such as lobster and crab)
- eggs
- fish
- lupin
- milk
- molluscs (such as mussels and oysters)
- mustard
- nuts (such as almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios and macadamia nuts)
- peanuts
- sesame seeds
- soybeans
- sulphur dioxide and sulphites (preservatives used in some foods and drinks) at levels above 10mg per kg or per litre
For more information on food labels visit the Food Standards Agency website
