The full legislation around vitamins and minerals claims can feel overwhelming. If you mess up your calculations, not only you are misleading your consumers, but you will have legal problems. Welcome to another episode of the Food Lab Podcast. I'm your host, Manon Galizzi. And today, we are continuing our series about nutrition and health claim and showing you exactly the step to follow to get your vitamins and minerals claims right every time.
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Hello, everyone. I hope you're doing well. If you're new to the nutrition and health claim, I definitely recommend you to listen to the previous episode first where I explain in more details what is a nutrition claim, what is health claim, and where to get the right information to support your claims.
The first thing to double check is that your product is considered as a fortified food. So if you use vitamins and minerals to improve the nutritional values of your product, if you use them to address common deficiencies or to compensate for a loss during the processes, then your product is considered as a fortified food.
Which is very different from the mandatory fortification that you can find on certain food, for example, flour and margarine.
Very different from any specific group of food such as infant formula or medical food.
And again, very different from food supplement.
So, also, if you use vitamins and minerals for other reason than fortification, so if you use them for homogeneity, stability, preservation, they will be classified as additive. So for example, I use potassium citrate as an acidity regulator for one of my clients product. And because I use it as an additive, they will be declared in the ingredient list as acidity regulator or use their E number.
So all of these follow their own legislation and they are very different from the fortified food legislation.
Just to make that clear before we start, before I have questions around: "Yeah. But what about food supplement?" They follow their own legislations.
Today, we are focusing on fortified food. So, again, vitamins and minerals you add to your product especially to improve the nutritional value. Again, address common deficiencies and things like that.
The first thing to do is to check which vitamins and minerals can be added to your product.
If you sell your product to The UK, you have to refer to the Great Britain vitamins and minerals and other substances register. I will put the link in the description of the episode.
So the document will list the vitamins and minerals that can be added to food and their formulation. So for example, the document will show you that you can add indeed vitamin c, but it will show you which form of the vitamin c you can add to your product. So for example, you can add vitamin c under L-ascorbic acid, sodium-L-ascorbate, calcium ascorbate.
The document also show you the restricted and the prohibited substances. So, again, very important to double check first this document before adding anything to your product.
Okay. So now you know the vitamins and the minerals you can add to your product, it is time to calculate the right amount of vitamins and minerals to support the claim. Let's start with nutrition claim and especially the "Source of vitamin or minerals".
To be able to use the nutrition claim "Source of vitamin or mineral", you need at least a significant amount of that vitamin or mineral. Now I know what you're gonna say. I thought the same. What on earth is a significant amount? Okay.Sit down.
The significant amount have to refer to the daily reference intake, sometimes you see RI, also called nutrition reference value NRVs. This one are much more common nowadays for vitamins and minerals. And, again, I will put the link in the description of the episode.
Okay, you have different rules. If your product contain one single portion, to reach that significant amount, the vitamins or minerals must count for minimum of 15% of the reference intake per portion. And this is for food and beverages.
If your product contain multiple portions and you have a recommended size that is less than 100g or 100ml, the vitamins or the minerals must count for minimum of 15% of the reference intake per portion. And that again include food and drinks.
If a food product contain multiple portions with either a recommended service size that is above 100g or 100ml or there is no serving size at all, the vitamins and the minerals must count for minimum of 15% of the reference intake per 100g or per 100ml.
If a drink product contain multiple portion with either a recommended serving size above 100ml or there is no serving size at all, the vitamins or the mineral must count for minimum of 7.5% of the reference intake per 100ml.
Now let's stay back. I'm gonna give you an example. So, hopefully, it's gonna be a little bit more clear.
So for example, you want to claim source of vitamin. The daily reference intake from the legislation says that for vitamin c, the daily reference intake for an adult is 80mg a day.
So if you have a single can of drink of 250ml, you will need 12mg of vitamin c.
If you have, for example, a big block of cheese of 350g, one of my favourite thing, but your serving size is to 30g. Then you will need 12mg of vitamin c per 30g of serving. So you will need 140mg in total.
If you have a ready meal of 800g, you will need 12mg of vitamin c per 100g. So you will need 96mg of vitamin c in total.
If you have 1L of flavoured water, you will need 6mg of vitamin c per 100ml, so 60mg in total.
Let's now have a look at health claims.
Most of the health claims actually refer to the nutrition claims. So if we take the example of vitamin c and we look at one of the health claim that you can do on your packaging, you can say, for example, "Vitamin c contribute to the normal function of the immune system". And for that, your product must contain at least a Source of vitamin c. Okay?
So then you can do exactly what we have done.
So now you have the tool to calculate nutrition and health claim, but always double check the register for exceptions.
So we have seen what type of vitamins and minerals you can add to your product, how much you need to be able to have a nutrition claim or health claim on your packaging and your website. Now you need to add this information to your nutrition labelling. And this is a mandatory information, the same as adding the amount of protein, sugar, carbohydrate, fat.
These need to appear as well as the percentage of the recommended intake.
Then, to be sure, I always recommend to do a lab test, especially over shelf life because you have again to guarantee to the consumers that the vitamins and minerals are indeed present in your product and it's just not theoretical. Okay?
And again, some of the vitamins and minerals are very sensitive to light or temperature so they will degrade very, very quickly. So you just have to be sure if your shelf life is six months, you have to be sure that the exact amount of vitamins or minerals you indicate on your packaging is there through the entire shelf life of your product.
And one of the thing that is very common in the food industry is to do overages. Again, sometimes, because the vitamins and minerals degrade, it's always a little bit better to have a little bit more quantity of that vitamin or mineral to start with because they degrade.
So you can guarantee at the end of the shelf life the exact amount that is on your packaging. But I already mentioned all of this in the previous episode. So if you want more details, go back to that episode.
Here we go. So if you want to add vitamins and minerals to your product or drink and be able to have either nutrition claim or health claim, I hope this was helpful.
In the next episode, I will be talking about how much fat, sugar, and salt impact the flavour of the food and drink product and some mistakes to avoid.
Thank you for listening.
If you got value from this episode, follow the podcast and subscribe to my newsletter for more tips and knowledge about food and drink product development. And I will see you the next episode. Bye.
