Citizen and NiceLabel help food companies hit allergy label deadline

Citizen Systems Europe and NiceLabel have teamed up to help food and beverage manufacturers comply with EU Food Labelling Regulation 1169/2011. The new regulation, which comes into force on 13th December 2014, requires manufacturers to emphasise the presence of allergenic foods on-pack and with less than five months to comply there is an urgent need to ensure that the right printing solutions are in place to cope with the legislation.

To ensure compliance, food suppliers are required to clearly highlight allergens in the ingredients list by following specific rules on layout and design. For example, Article 21 (labelling of allergens) of 1169/2011 stipulates that an allergenic ingredient is, "emphasised through a typeset that clearly distinguishes it from the rest of the ingredients by means of the font, style or background colour."

To help food and beverage companies get up-to-speed quickly and achieve compliance with the new regulation, NiceLabel has developed a simple, smart labelling solution that enables users to automatically highlight allergens without modifying their existing databases. "Our food allergens solution produces labels that automatically and clearly emphasise the 14 allergenic substances listed within the EU regulations," explains Ken Moir, Marketing Director of NiceLabel. "This is a unique solution in that it allows users with no programming knowledge to create their own printing solutions and achieve compliance with minimum effort."

Meanwhile, Citizen printers produce high resolution and fast output labelling to help businesses meet the new regulation. "Highlighting allergens in the ingredients list in a clear manner means that the quality of the print is critical. A reliable thermal printer is necessary to correctly print font sizes, styles and print on coloured backgrounds," says Jörk Schüßler, European Marketing Manager for Citizen Systems Europe. "For cost-effective, low to medium volume printing the CL-S521 and CL-S621 combine performance with reliability to deliver hundreds of labels every day. For medium to high volume, the CL-S700 provides ultra-fast print out of up to 250mm per second. And to provide the higher resolution required to print smaller labels Citizen's CL-S631 and CL-S703 printers are available as 300 dpi options."

To help food and beverage companies to understand and act on the legislation, Citizen and NiceLabel have produced a white paper entitled, 'How to ensure compliance with EU Food Labelling Regulation 1169/2011'. The paper offers useful advice on how to achieve compliance, including a checklist of things to consider in order to meet the deadline.

To download a copy of the white paper, click here http://www.citizen-europe.com/en/Food_Labelling_Regulation