Nutritics has added South African food labels to their integrated food labelling system, making it easier for food businesses and manufacturers to comply with legislation and to increase efficiency by streamlining the workflow from recipe to label.

To help users to automatically generate compliant South African front-of-pack and back-of-pack labels, the Nutritics labelling system also includes all of the below requirements. All features can be easily switched on or off and customised to suit labelling requirements.

Mandatory information on a South African label

In order to enable consumers to make more informed choices and protect them from misleading or confusing information, the Foodstuffs Act and the Regulations relating to the labelling and advertising of foodstuffs govern what information must appear on a label and how that information should be displayed on a product.

Brand name and product description 

  • Name and address of the manufacturer, importer or seller
  • Name and physical address of the manufacturer, importer or seller must appear on the label.
  • If a product is manufactured on behalf of another company, it needs to be indicated as “manufactured on behalf of XYZ” and the physical address of XYZ must be added.

List of ingredients

  • Ingredients have to be listed in descending order of weight (ingredients with the largest quantity appear first).
  • Food additives must be displayed in the list of ingredients. The chemical name of a preservative needs to be followed by the word “preservative” and the list of preservatives in parenthesis.

Allergens

  • When a product contains any common food allergen, their presence must be indicated on the label. 

Special storage instructions

  • Storage instructions shall appear in bold font, upper-case letters not less than 3mm in height, if applicable.

Best before, sell by and use by dates

  • Must be indicated on the label as: “best before”, “BB” and/or “use by” and/or “sell by”.
  • Anybody is prohibited from removing or changing the date marking.

Nutritional information panels

  • If claims are made on the label, respective nutrition information is compulsory.
  • Nutritional information must be displayed in the tabular format.
  • Energy content has to be stated in “kilojoules” or “kJ”.
  • The amount of each nutrient must be expressed per 100 g/ml and per single serving.

How to create South African food labels

  1. Build your recipes in Nutritics using our extensive food database.
  2. Nutritics automatically does the calculations for you – nutrition, allergens & cost.
  3. Design your label with our drag & drop template.
  4. That’s it! Just hit print!

Creating an appropriate food label is traditionally a complex manual process rife with many pitfalls! Nutritics allows you to easily create labels for your products that are suitable for use in South Africa as well as in the UK, US, Europe and Australia.

Please note: In South Africa, Nutritics is used as a tool to assist in label creation.It is advised to seek consultation on compliance.If you wish to make a claim about the nutritional content of your food product, laboratory analysis is required.