FOOD SAFETY AND STANDARDS (ADVERTISING & CLAIMS) REGULATIONS

• A food product can be referred to as natural if it is a single food derived from a recognised natural source and has nothing added to it.
• It should only have been processed to render it suitable for human consumption.
• The Packaging too must be done sans chemicals and preservatives.
• Composite foods, which are essentially a mixture of plant and processed constituents, cannot call themselves "natural", instead, they can say "made from natural ingredients".
• Fresh can be used for products which are not processed in any manner other than washing, peeling, chilling, trimming, cutting or irradiation by ionising radiation not exceeding 1 KGy or any other processing such that it remains safe for consumption with the basic characteristics unaltered.
• Those with additives (to increase shelf life) may instead use "freshly frozen", fresh frozen" or frozen from fresh" to contextualise that it was quickly frozen while fresh.

4. About the "Pure" and "original"

• Pure is to be used for single-ingredient foods to which nothing has been added and which are devoid of all avoidable contamination, while unavoidable contaminants are within prescribed controls.
• Original is used to describe food products made to a formulation, with a traceable origin that has remained unchanged over time.
• They do not contain replacements for any major ingredients. It may similarly be used to describe a unique process which has remained unchanged over time, although the product may be mass-produced.

5. Nutritional claims

• Nutritional claims may either be about the specific contents of a product or comparisons with some other foodstuffs.
• Claims of equivalence such as "contains the same of (nutrient) as a (food) or as much (nutrient) as a (food) may be used in the labelling provided that it gives the equivalent nutritional value as the reference food.
• Most complaints of misleading ads were related to the nutrition of a product, its benefits and the ingredient mix not being based on adequate evidence.
• A lot of claim data is to be based on technical data. For example, if you say, that there is Vitamin D in my product, we need evidence to substantiate that there indeed is Vitamin D in your product.
• Then if you claim that Vitamin D in your product can also help reduce fatigue, improve stamina or another claim like that then there needs to be enough literature to substantiate that the ingredient does what is being stated.