You Should Definitely Use a Nutrition Professional to Make Health Claims About Your Food Product
If you’re new to the food industry its likely that you’re trying to get everything just right. The perfect logo, the perfect tagline, recipe, packaging, font — you name it. And why shouldn’t you? You’re taking a product you’re passionate about and you’re trying to get it into as many stores and on people’s plates as quickly as you can. To make that happen, it’s important that you display things on your packaging that really catch the eye of the person buying your product. If you are creating a healthy food product, this article is all about helping you appeal to your target customer through health benefits you can promote on the front of your product’s packaging — specifically health claims, nutrient/content and structural/functional claims. We have covered these claims in detail in previous articles, so please make sure that your read them! Below we’ll cover a quick recap before we go into things you can do to make these claims really stand out!
What are claims?
“Claims” such as health claims, nutrient and content claims are things that you can place on the front of your product packaging that are true about your product. These claims can be anything from “good source of iron” to “low fat” or “vegan”. Check out our articles on claims for a deeper understanding by clicking the links below:
- Health Claims
- Nutrient Content Claims
- Functional/Structural Claims
How do I know which claims to make?
Once you’ve understood what claims are, it’s important to make sure that you are making accurate claims about your product. The FDA tends to be really strict about the accuracy of the claims that you place on your food product. Over the last 15 years in serving food manufacturers like you, we’ve done a lot of claims work for clients through our consulting services. Everyone you speak to at LabelCalc is a degreed nutrition professional, a food manufacturing expert with years of experience, or both! So when it comes to determining which claims are appropriate for your product, we’re definitely up for the task!
Health and nutrient content claims are based on your food product’s actual nutrition reporting. This is why we highly recommend an experienced nutrition professional determine these claims for you 🙂
Making claims about your product all begins with your nutrition analysis (which is yet another reason why we’re not only equipped, but totally happy to complete this task for you). Once your product recipe has been entered into the LabelCalc platform and we can view the nutrition profile of your product, we can then determine which claims are true about your product. For example, according to the FDA, you can make a health claim of “low fat” if 3 g or less per 100 g and not more than 30% of calories from fat. If your product meets this criteria, then it’s okay to say that your product is “low fat” on the front of your packaging. This is a qualified health claim. Claims can not be made unless the recipe analysis lines up with the criteria established by the FDA. This is why we highly recommend a nutrition professional who is experienced in food manufacturing and health claims for your front-of-packaging needs.
Once I have had my claims determined by a nutrition professional, how can I put them on my packaging?
Once you’ve had a qualified nutrition professional evaluate your product nutrition reporting and compile all of your nutrient content, health, and structural/functional claims, you can word them nicely and send them over to your co-packer or your designer for placement on your front of packaging. For the health-minded shopper, these claims will be like gold mines and will help your product sell quicker.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it! Place your product in safe hands, and you’ll wind up with some great health claims you can make about your product in no time!
