New guide will help consumers with food allergies

An industry guide to help people with food allergies, the revised 2007 Food Industry Guide to Allergen Management and Labelling, includes processes to help manufacturers minimise the accidental presence of allergens in foods.

Developed by the Australian Food and Grocery Council’s (AFGC) Allergen Forum, the guide represents a best-practice approach to managing the presence of accidental allergens in foods, and also addresses the perception that ‘may contain’ statements are unreliable.

Sometimes there are situations where manufacturers simply can’t eliminate the risk of the accidental presence of allergens occurring in a product.

Communicating this information to allergic consumers is very important. The guide outlines a new consistent approach to presenting this information so that allergic consumers can be confident about the foods that they should and should not eat.

At present a wide variety of precautionary statements are made about foods that may contain allergens, such as ‘Made on a premises which also uses…’ or ‘Packed on a production line that also handles…’.

This could be confusing for allergic consumers, perhaps even leading to some people ignoring these statements and taking a risk. The guide recommends replacing all precautionary statements with the single term ‘May be present…’.

This statement should only be made after the food manufacturer has followed all possible procedures to reduce the likelihood of the unintentional presence of an allergen and has determined that the amount of allergen that may be present in the food is sufficient to warrant alerting allergic consumers not to buy the product.

For more information visit www.afgc.org.au