Meat Nutritional Labeling: Effective Date Quickly Approaching

We're reposting a blog post from November of last year as a refresher on the upcoming Meat Nutritional Labeling.

March 1, 2012 marks the effective date for mandatory nutrition labeling requirements for single-ingredient products and ground/chopped meat and poultry products in the USA.

In December 2010, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) mandated that on January 1, 2012, the major cuts of meat must have nutritional labeling on the pack or at the point of purchase. Additionally, single-ingredient ground meat must have the meat nutritional facts on the package.1

Applied Data Corporation (ADC), a leading provider of fresh item, recipe management, and scales management software to the grocery retail and food service industries, has extended its systems within InterStore.Net, ADC's Fresh Item Management (FIM) suite of software, to provide readily available solutions to supermarket chains for the upcoming meat nutritional labeling requirements.

InterScale, ADC's brand-neutral scales management system, hosts nutrifacts to the barcode labeling scales in meat departments, regardless of manufacturer, from one centralized H.Q. system. InterScale supports different nutrifacts by vendor/supplier for the same item/PLU across stores. Nutrifacts information must be presented on labels in a rigorous and standardized format. InterScale now hosts these label formats to scales and printers from the major manufacturers, allowing the retailer large savings by avoiding expensive hands-on service calls by the scale provider.

NutriGen, ADC's Recipe Management software, calculates nutritional labeling information from a recipe's sub-recipes and raw ingredients, allowing InterScale to send this data to the in-store barcode labeling scales and label printers.

"ADC is continually working with our clients and the scale manufacturers to provide a solution that will exceed the mandate set forth by the FSIS for meat nutritional labeling," said Steve Loveridge, President of ADC. "Currently, we have some clients who are ahead of the legislation deadline by already hosting nutrifacts to their barcode labeling scales and providing this information on meat packages. We hope to see this number increase as the sunrise date approaches."

InterScale and NutriGen are systems within ADC's InterStore.Net suite of FIM software, which is an integrated software suite to provide greater efficiencies through optimization of food preparation and transformation processes in the grocer's fresh-food departments. InterStore.Net also includes P-Cubed in-store food production software and other specialized meat management modules such as cutting templates, cutting tests and meat traceability management.

¹http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/RDAD/FRPubs/2005-0018F.pdf

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