Food Rotation Manager

Natasha’s Law and Substitute Products – The Unforeseen Challenge

One of the biggest issues food businesses face with Natasha’s Law is the term full ingredient disclosure. At first this does not seem such a daunting task and once you have created your ingredient listing job done. However from October this year it will be the responsibility of the food business owner to get this right.

The biggest unforeseen challenge here is substitute ingredients.

For example, let’s say you run a sandwich business and make over 100 variety of products of which 20 of them are varieties of white bread based products. You source your bread from a local baker who’s oven has now broke down and he cannot supply you with your usual bread. To get over this you have to source bread from a different supplier and the ingredient listing for that bread will be different. This substitute products ingredient information must be updated on all of the white bread products. Multiply this across any other ingredient you may need to substitute for your product range and you can start to see the challenge here.

The sub ingredient tool inside our Front of House module helps to resolve this issue by managing the ingredients at a single record level. So instead of having to search through a database of products replacing ingredients, simply open the sub ingredient editor, edit the ingredient list of that specific sub ingredient that has changed, in this example white bread and save it. Instantly all of your 20 white bread products now have the latest ingredient list.