The way food businesses in the UK must provide allergen labelling information for pre-packed for direct sale (PPDS) food will change on October 1st, 2021. These changes will provide essential information to help people with a food allergy or intolerance to make safe choices when buying PPDS food.

Under the UK Food Information Amendment or Natasha’s Law, UK Food Businesses must list all ingredients on individual packaging of products that are considered PPDS. In simple terms, PPDS can be defined as food which is packaged at the same place it is offered or sold to consumers and is in this packaging before it is ordered or selected.

Natasha’s Law aims to expand the level of information available to the consumer. In order to achieve this goal, suppliers have both a legal and ethical obligation to work collaboratively and cooperatively with customers ie. food businesses. Here are our top 3 tips for suppliers on managing incoming Natash'as Law:

1. Fulfill your obligation to provide the exact ingredient composition of foods to your customers: Ideally, supplier data should be provided via a live product feed providing real-time and up-to-date product information directly to your customers. Consider a system that facilitates a direct link with customers and has inbuilt accuracy and reliability checks.

2. Develop a relationship with your customers: Take time to meet the owners/managers of the food businesses supplied by your company. Next time you meet, ascertain the business’ preferred brands and agree a substitution process in the event these are not available. This is a critical element as unexpected arrival of a new product at the premises of your customer without prior notification may result in inaccurate food labelling information. Use of an electronic food information management system automates this process, making management of information quick and easy.

3. Maintain food information with security: A high level of security should be offered by your software provider. In advance of choosing your software, request information on the level of security provided. At a minimum, software should use encryption technology and data should be hosted on accredited, dedicated servers. Web based software is automatically backed up and updated as required and modern encryption technology makes most online software even more secure than local software, choosing the right software can make complying with your obligations under GDPR easy.

How can Nutritics help:

The Nutritics supplier portal facilitates a direct link with food businesses wherein your entire product catalogue can be accessed. It has built in accuracy and reliability checks to minimise inaccuracies and is designed to facilitate the transfer of any product attribute, such as costings, co2 footprint and allergen data.

Using Nutritics, your customers will receive product reformulation updates in real time, thereby eliminating extraneous administrative tasks. If a change is made to one of your products, a notification will appear for the customer. Until accepted, the customer will have access and use of existing information, enabling them to clear stock before replacing it with the updated version. By accepting the changes Nutritics will do an automatic find and replace of anywhere that product was used in your recipe and update them accordingly. Associated labels will also be updated with new amended ingredient and allergen information.

Maintenance of a live product feed means you can rest assured that reformulation resultant changes to allergenic profile of products are communicated to the customer. Once a change is made to a product, you will be required to click scan for allergens again to verify the presence of any new allergens.

In addition, gain access to valuable features such as costings and facility for labelling.

For more information on the supplier portal, or any of our other enterprise features, book in for a free demo or contact sales@nutritics.com