How to Calculate Nutrition Data Using Excel or Open Office Calc |
Posted: December 27, 2018 |
EU directive 1169/2011 has full impact on the 13th of December 2016. The first phase of the directive came into effect in 2014 on December 13th but the next needs nutrition data that begs the question of how to calculate nutrition information. The first phase of the regulation required that all components on labels needed to comprise allergen information inside the ingredient listing. Prior to this law, it had been legally acceptable to include allergen information in a different area of your tag. The new regulations only need allergens to be highlighted inside the single ingredient listing for the product but ingredients also have to be mentioned in quantitative order. Quantitative order only means the largest constituent ingredient must be indicated first, then the 2nd biggest and so forth. The percentages of these ingredients should also be included. There are several ways highlighting ingredients could be achieved; Users can utilize bold text underline text colour text or italic text There are 14 allergens that must be indicated on labelling if they are present within the ingredients of the product. These include oats or wheat or any other cereal containing gluten free and also include milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, molluscs to list a few. Another facet of the law was to harmonise the legibility of text on food labels. Historically, the text could be incredibly hard to read as manufacturers put as much information to as small a section of the tag as possible in order to increase the marketing potential of the remaining part of the tag. The new regulations demand that all text has to be legible with a particular height of the letter"x" in the font no greater than 1.2 millimetres. In layman's terms, that means that the typical Arial or Times New Roman font should be 6.5 points and size. The next phase of these regulations coming into force this December demands that nutrition data is supplied with pre-packaged meals so that consumers can make decisions regarding the nutrition within the food they purchase. The law stipulates that this information must be conveyed to the customer per 100 grams. It's also possible to convey the information also per serving so, as an example, a sandwich could create a serving so that a food producer could provide the info depending on the full sandwich. The food producer can also indicate nutrition values in a portion, for example, a biscuit or a little slice of chocolate. But the food producer must also provide the info in a per 100g format in most instances. How to Calculate Nutrition Data To be able to calculate the nutrition values of prepackaged food available to the public food manufacturing businesses need to know the nutrition values for the constituent components within their product. Possibly the best way to show how to calculate nutrition data is to give an illustration; a ham and mustard sandwich. A ham and mustard sandwich may consist of four components; we will have the ham, bread, mustard, and butter or margarine to make a sandwich. Every one of these ingredients will be integrated along the lines of a recipe; that is to say, there'll be a specific weight of each item to make up a normal item. Food makers need to start with the fundamental data for the nourishment for every one of the components - as mentioned, the legislation requires that nourishment data is provided per 100 g. As all producers are required to perform this most food manufacturing companies should be able to obtain that information directly from the packaging of their products they buy in or by speaking with their supplier. In our example, the food producer could tabulate the data from the constituent ingredients into a table. The information that must be conveyed includes energy in both kilojoules and kilocalories; they must also convey total fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar, protein, and sodium - all in grams. Food producers can also indicate monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fats, polyols and starch (that are carbohydrates) and fiber if they wish to do so. The purchase price of the nourishment is specific and must be adhered to obey the regulations. Once the table of information is prepared per 100 g for every one of the components, the food manufacturer should understand the weight of every product used in the recipe to make the sandwich. In this instance, the food manufacturer would have to know the weight of 2 slices of bread (let's say 60 grams), the ham that they use (e.g. 30 g ), 10 grams of sliced 5 g of margarine. After this was completed a simple calculation is applied to each of the constituent ingredients to find out just how many calories, how much fat, saturated fat etc., is present in the recipe. The calculation is going to be to split the per 100g nourishment data by 100 then multiply that by the weight of the constituent in the ingredient. E.g.. In case 100g of ham is 350 calories, divided by 100 is 3.5 calories per gram. Once this is complete, the food maker is going to have an exact indication of the total nutrition data for your ham and mustard sandwich by simply adding the values for each component ingredient together as a total to your recipe. And that is the best way to calculate nutrition information with Microsoft Excel or Open Office 2016 Calc. At the moment, food manufacturers across the united kingdom are facing a massive challenge in attaining the objectives set out in the regulations and they will need to tackle them very quickly if they have not already. To be able to assist food companies across the united kingdom, Positive ID Labelling have developed Nutridata Nutrition Calculation Software that allows food users to input their constituent components, produce recipes and then create and product data to mee the EU Regulations. Nutridata software mechanically calculates nutrition information for food producers and exports is in an Excel spreadsheet that may be used with labelling applications or can be used by graphic designers to change information on tags printed it tag producers.
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