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Let us tell you about differentiating allergens… Here at Positive ID Labels, we produce thousands of food labels for our customers to suit various needs. Under the current legislation, in the ingredient list, allergens labelling needs to be differentiated from the other ingredients. Despite the unfounded belief this must be done by emboldening text, the law does not prescribe how allergens are highlighted. Therefore, highlighting can be achieved in a number of ways:
Here at Positive ID Labels we recommend UPPERCASE text to identify the allergen and effect allergen labelling. Unfortunately, one of the restrictions of Label Direct software is that it cannot ‘see’ bold text in the database for the ingredient list. It can only pick up uppercase or lower case. As a result, we highly recommend using uppercase text to highlight the allergens along with a statement such as “Allergens in UPPERCASE” at the beginning or end of your ingredient list.
Having said this, it is possible to use a special font to achieve bold text – we can supply the font for you when you buy a sandwich label printer from us. The font uses a trick to achieve this. You write your ingredients in lower case and type the allergens in uppercase. When text is shown on the label, a bold text in lowercase is shown, instead of the uppercase. It is a trick but it does work.
One thing to consider when doing allergen labelling is that the majority of printers are only 200dpi in resolution. As such, bold text does not ‘jump out’ of the text very well. It is possible to get a clearer difference using a 300dpi print head – however, 300 dpi print heads are more expensive and print more slowly than 200dpi.
Another way of overcoming this is by using a different labelling software called EnLabel. This is an upgraded version of the labelling Label Direct software but can be used on any printer – not only TSC printers. EnLabel can identify markup text. Markup text is good for allergen labelling as you can format text as you might markup html for a webpage. To do this, you only need to enclose your allergens in tags.
E.g.
<strong>strong</strong> displays as strong
So for example, if you wanted to highlight the phrase “Mayonnaise (EGGS)” in strong text, you would write:
<strong>Mayonnaise (EGGS)</strong> displays as Mayonnaise (EGGS)
You can use a number of highlighting tags:
We still think it is easier to just write your allergens in UPPERCASE. We have even developed some software to help you do this. Visit Nutridata – our nutrition and allergen labelling software solution to find out more.
But don’t worry if this seems a bit difficult, we can show you directly how to do this as part of your free training when you buy a sandwich labelling system from us.
Positive ID Labels obviously thrives on providing labels for our customers. All of our labelling systems are supported by our own labelling manufacturing capability, ranging from as few as 5,000 to as many as 5,000,000 labels… and all at competitive prices.
To find out more or get some advice on allergen labelling, call us on 01332 8648995 or fill in the form below: