M.R. Subramani

Chennai, Aug. 6 The Centre has postponed by six months its plan to implement the labelling norms for packaged foods, including edible oils, following difficulties faced by the industry in meeting the requirements. The norms required food manufacturers to provide exact details of nutrition and energy value in their products.

A notification issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said the norms would now come into effect from February 20 next instead of August 20.

According to industry sources, the Union Government decided to put off the mandatory requirement following representation from various sectors.

“There are practical problems in meeting the labelling norms. In particular, we will face problems in printing the nutritional values in the label. The stipulations prescribed by the Centre are not pragmatic and therefore, we represented for putting it off pending further discussions,” the sources said.

Though the Ministry has said the regulations would come into effect from February, industry players expect the Centre to discuss the issue with them threadbare and come up with a practical solution.

The regulation on nutritional values stipulates that “manufactured and imported food stuffs claiming to be enriched with nutrients such as minerals, proteins, or vitamins, should indicate quantities of such added nutrients on the label. The health claims should be able to withstand the verification of a court of law, if challenged.

“For instance, the norms require us to prescribe exactly the content of a nutrition, say iodine, per 100 gm. The nutrition content differs from batch to batch and therefore, it will be difficult to give an exact value. This could lead to various problems, including harassment by officials,” said the sources.

Instead of asking manufacturers to pinpoint the exact percentage of nutrition in the food, it would be better to term the range within which the nutrition would be present in the packaged food. “This is the universal practice and we are only asking for such a norm,” the sources said.

The edible oil industry, in particular, had been worried over the issue as the regulations required them to provide on the label information on energy value, amounts of protein, carbohydrate, fat, amount and type of fatty acids including saturated fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acids and trans fatty acids, cholesterol and numerical information on vitamins and mineral. These ingredients vary from batch to batch and the industry has been contending that it is not possible to print batch-wise label.

Similarly, in vanaspati, the composition of fatty acid including trans fatty acid varies according to the edible oils used in the product mix.

According to the sources, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs had taken up the issue with the Health Ministry and following the postponement of the implementation of the norms, wide range discussions with the industry could be held.

The labelling requirements were to be implemented under the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act. While most of the requirements under the Act such as name of the manufacturer, ingredients, colour indications to say whether they were vegetarian or non-vegetarian, have been implemented since November 2006, the implementation of the nutritional and energy value norms has been pending.

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