Food In Canada

CSPI urges FDA to end “food labelling chaos”

By Food in Canada staff   

Business Operations Exporting & Importing Regulation Center for Science in the Public Interest Food and Drug Administration USDA


The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) – Washington has asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to stop “egregious…false claims, ingredient obfuscations and other labelling shenanigans” on food products.

The CSPI sent the U.S. FDA a report documenting specific examples late last year.

In a release, the CSPI notes that under the Obama Administration, the FDA is sending more warning letters to food manufacturers about misleading labelling.

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But, says the CSPI, major food manufacturers continue to confuse or defraud consumers about the health effects, ingredients or “natural”-ness of their products.

Labelling overhaul

The CSPI offered some of its own recommendations, which include:

Front-of-package Nutrition Labelling: Key nutrition information should be summarized, using easy-to-comprehend symbols.

Improving the Nutrition Facts Panel by

• deleting extraneous information;

• providing clearer and more accurate information on calorie, sugars and fibre content;

• changing disclosures for “Amount per serving” and “Serving size” to statements like “Amount per ½ cup serving.”

• prohibiting deceptive nutrition disclosures for large single-serving packages;

• making nutrition labelling mandatory for single-ingredient meat and poultry products.

Ingredient labels: The format of ingredient labels should be modernized by:

    • redesigning the ingredient list so that ingredient information is presented in a format similar to that used for nutrition information.

    • requiring that sources of added sugars be grouped together to give a better indication of total sugar content;

    • requiring that the amounts of key ingredients be disclosed as percentages of the total weight of the product;  

    • mandating that caffeine content be disclosed in a conspicuous location on the information panel.


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