How to calculate nutrition data using Excel or Open Office Calc
The EU directive 1169/2011 comes into effect on December 13, 2016. The first phase of this directive came into effect on December 13, 2014, but the second requires nutritional data, which raises the question of how to calculate the nutritional data.
The first phase of this regulation required that all ingredients on labels must include allergen information within the list of ingredients. Before this regulation, it was legally acceptable to include allergen information in a separate area of your label.
The new regulations simply require allergens to be highlighted within the product’s unique ingredient list, but the ingredients must also be listed in quantitative order.
Quantitative ordering simply means that the largest constituent ingredient should be listed first, then the second largest, and so on. The percentages of these ingredients should also be included.
There are several ways that highlighting ingredients can be achieved; Users can use bold text, underlined text, colored text, or italic text.
There are 14 allergens that must be indicated on the label if they are present within the ingredients of the product. These include wheat or oats or any other cereals that contain gluten and also include milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, to name a few.
Another aspect of the legislation was to harmonize the readability of text on food labels.
Historically, text could be incredibly difficult to read, as manufacturers crammed as much information into as small a section of the label as possible to maximize the marketing potential of the rest of the label.
The new regulations require that all text be legible with a specific height of the letter “x” in the font not less than 1.2 millimeters. In layman’s terms, that means the standard Arial or Times New Roman font should be 6.5 points and one size.
The second phase of the regulations that will go into effect in December requires nutrition facts to be supplied with all pre-packaged foods so that consumers can make choices regarding the nutrition within the foods they buy.
The law states that this information must be transmitted to the customer per 100 grams.
It is also possible to convey the information additionally per serving, eg a sandwich would constitute a serving so that a food producer can provide the information based on the entire sandwich. The food producer can also indicate nutritional values in a portion, for example, a cookie or a small piece of chocolate. But the food producer must also provide the information in a per 100g format in all cases.
How to calculate nutrition facts
To calculate the nutritional values of prepackaged foods for sale to the public, food production companies need to know the nutritional values of the constituent ingredients of their product. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how to calculate nutrition facts is to give an example; a ham and mustard sandwich.
A ham and mustard sandwich can consist of four ingredients; we will have the bread, the ham, the mustard and the margarine or butter to make a sandwich. Each of these ingredients will be incorporated along the lines of a recipe; that is, there will be a specific weight of each product to make up a standard product.
Food manufacturers should start with basic nutrition facts for each of the ingredients; as mentioned, the legislation requires that nutrition data be provided for every 100 grams. Since all manufacturers are required to do this, most food companies should be able to get that information directly from the packaging of the products they buy or by talking to their supplier.
In our example, the food producer could tabulate the constituent ingredient data in a table. The information to be transmitted includes energy in both kilojoules and kilocalories; they should also convey total fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar, protein, and salt, all in grams.
Food manufacturers can also list monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, polyols, and starch (which are carbohydrates), and fiber if they choose.
The order of the nutrients is specific and must be respected to comply with the regulations.
Once the per 100 gram data table is prepared for all ingredients, the food producer needs to understand the weight of each product used in the recipe to make the sandwich. In this example, the food producer would need to know the weight of two slices of bread (say 60 grams), the ham he uses (say 30 grams), 10 grams of mustard and 5 grams of margarine.
Once this is done, a simple calculation is applied to each of the ingredients that make it up to determine how many calories, how much fat, saturated fat, etc. is present in the recipe. The calculation will be dividing the nutritional data per 100g by 100 and then multiplying that by the weight of what makes up the ingredient.
For example, if 100g of ham is 350 calories, divided by 100 is 3.5 calories per gram. 3.5 calories per gram x 30 grams used in the recipe is 105 calories.
Once this is complete, the food manufacturer will have an accurate indication of the total nutritional data for the ham and mustard sandwich by simply adding the values of each constituent ingredient as a total for the recipe.
And this is how nutrition data is calculated using Microsoft Excel or Open Office Calc.
At the moment, food manufacturers across the UK face a huge challenge in achieving the targets set out in the regulations and need to address them quickly if they have not already done so.