CAC49 / Groundbreaking guidelines set to fundamentally change food allergen labelling

The Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) has agreed at its 49th Session in Geneva this week to adopt groundbreaking guidelines on the use of food labelling known as “precautionary allergen labelling”. When used, these food labels, which can include warnings such as “may contain nuts”, alert the millions of food allergy sufferers around the world to food that can potentially cause them harm when it may contain a food allergen or traces of a food allergen.

However, such warnings have become ubiquitous in recent years. “Precautionary allergen labelling tends to be overused or misused such that consumers lose trust in food labelling, and either limit their consumption of foods that are perfectly safe for them or ignore the warnings and increase the risk to their health,” explains Sarah Cahill, Secretary of the Codex Alimentarius Commission.With these new Codex guidelines, food businesses have guidance on how to ensure they eliminate or drastically reduce cross contact of food allergens during food handling and processing, and, for the first time, they have science-backed thresholds by which to measure whether their products are safe for the vast majority of food allergy sufferers. This will mean that the use of precautionary allergen labelling can be safely reduced to “strictly when necessary” scenarios.

“Reduced use of PAL will make a wider range of food products available to food allergic consumers, they can have greater confidence that when they do see precautionary allergen labelling precisely what it means, and they can be sure that allergen labelling is consistent across food products from across the world,” explains Kang Zhou, the Food Safety and Quality Officer at FAO who was deeply involved in the expert consultations that informed the scientific advice provided by FAO and WHO to the Codex Committee on Food Labelling (CCFL).

At CAC, the Chairperson of CCFL, Dr Parthi Muthukumarasamy, Director-General of the International Policy and Trade Directorate of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency welcomed the Commission’s agreement to this work, commenting that “for people living with food allergies, clear and reliable information can make a critical difference. The adoption of the guidelines is an outcome that reflects years of dedicated work by governments, consumer organizations, industry representatives and international science experts.”

With the adoption of the CAC report on Friday 10 July, the new guidelines on precautionary allergen labelling will be included as an annex to CCFL’s General standard for the labelling of pre-packaged foods (CXS 1-1985).

Read more

CAC49 webpage
CCFL webpage