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Celine Sun

The government is about to launch an online nutrition label calculator to make it cheaper for food sellers and manufacturers to comply with the new food-labelling law that will come into force next year. 
The online calculator, to be launched by the Centre for Food Safety in a couple of weeks, will enable users to print nutrition labels themselves after filling in information on a product's ingredients and manufacturing procedures. 
The centre says the other way to acquire an up-to-standard nutrition label is to have the products tested in laboratories, but that costs more. 
The calculator is one of a number of measures being taken by the government to help the food industry meet the requirements of the food-labelling law.
Enacted at the Legislative Council in May, the regulation governing pre-packaged food will come into operation from July next year,  after a grace period of two years. 
It will require food sold by retailers and wholesalers to carry labels detailing the contents' total energy and seven core nutrients, including trans-fats.  
Kampery Group,  an importer and producer of organic food, tea and drinks, has labelled 100 of the 600-plus products it sells in Hong Kong. 
Simon Wong Ka-wo,  group chairman,  welcomed the cost-saving idea of an online calculator. 
'It takes around HK$1,500 to HK$3,500 to carry out a single lab test,' he said. 'The expense will be quite considerable with numerous product categories and ongoing tests you have to do.' 
The  calculator will be free  for public use. 
However, users may need to acquire basic information about  a product's nutritional content from overseas databases if   it is imported. 
 Nestle Hong Kong spokeswoman Chan Yee-ping  said it did not plan to use the  calculator to make labels for its hundreds of products. 
'We believe lab tests are more accurate, though it's more expensive,' she said. 
Centre for Food Safety consultant  Ho Yuk-yin  said around half the products sold locally already had nutrition labels, although some failed to meet the new requirements. 
'We have noticed that more and more food products launched in the market have adopted qualified nutrition labelling,' he said.
 'We are confident most of them will meet our regulation early next year.'
Weighty issue
A survey of 1,213 people by the Centre  for Food Safety in July found that the proportion who always or often read nutrition labels when buying a food item for the first time was: 54%



Online nutrition calculator aims to reduce costs for food industry