Nutrition Symbol, Milk Fortification Updates and Sweetener FOP Labelling is no more

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Dear valued clients, 

Health Canada released the regulations  on July 20th, 2022. 

There were a number of regulatory wording changes made through the Food and Drug regulations but the big three are:

  1. Sweeteners: Good news for companies using these in their products. The front of pack declaration labelling requirement [sweetened with…] has finally been done away with. You will still be required to include the quantities in milligrams per serving on the label.
  2. Vitamin D fortification of dairy products wording has been revised and updated to use µg rather than International Units (IU).

And the brownie goes to:

  • Nutrition Symbols – the new symbol Health Canada has come up with to identify the presence of Sat fat, Sugar and Sodium is about as complicated as they can make it:
    • It is based on the Principal display surface (PDF) – the surface area of the front of your package
    • Products are broken out into four types: exempt, products with less than 30 g serving size ; prepackaged main dishes [a new definition for most products know as “combination dishes” in the Table of Reference Amounts for Foods] and all other prepackaged products that don’t fall into these categories. 
    • The %dv cut-off to qualify for declaration of each of the three nutrients are also based on the above:
      • Prepackaged product with a reference amount below 30 g: 10%
      • Prepacked products with a reference amount of 30 g or more: 15%
      • Prepackaged main dishes with a reference amount of 200 g or more: 30% 
    • The Nutrition Symbol has horizontal and vertical formats, unilingual and bilingual formats, 1, 2 and 3-declared nutrient formats and a very specific set of requirements for everything in the symbols that is based on the PDS. 

The good news is that, while the new regulations came into force on July 20th, they have a compliance date of December 31, 2025. This means you have a little under 3½ years to apply these changes to your packages. 

Please feel free to call me to discuss this latest development in Canadian labelling.

Have a great day and stay safe,

Niccolas

 

 

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