Understanding Food Label Regulations Of The U.S., EU, And China

The past decade has seen an enormous increase in food safety concerns. While many efforts have been made to mitigate contamination and improper handling of food products, it is only recently that similar concerns about consumer education have become part of the larger conversation. This is not to say that product labels have lacked for regulation — there are laws going back decades dictating the sort of information that product labels require. However, apart from a basic set of guidelines, labels could take on nearly any sort of appearance, so long as a few particular pieces of information — name of the product, a list of ingredients, the name of the manufacturer, and the address of whichever company owned the brand name — were present in some form or another.

As governments and regulators move to respond to consumer pressures, food manufacturers are left to comply with the new regulations in order to avoid recalls, decertification, or fines. For food manufacturers selling products globally, this means keeping track of the mounting labeling regulations for each country, as well as ensuring every product label is up to specifications. There are an increasing number of ways how a label might now fail to meet one of those specifications, making a strict label quality control process more necessary than ever.