Nutrition Labeling

FDA and USDA Need a Coordinated Assessment of Food Label Accuracy Gao ID: RCED-95-19 December 29, 1994

The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 seeks to provide consumers with uniform and accurate nutrition information on food labels. To help guarantee the accuracy of this information, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will do laboratory analyses of food products and visual reviews of food labels. However, relatively few labels will be verified by laboratory analyses, and the visual reviews will not verify the accuracy of the nutrient values. Because of these limitations and the flexibility given food companies in developing the nutrient values on labels, the accuracy of the information provided on about 50,000 labels will depend largely on the food industry. Because the new nutrition labeling requirements have applied to food companies only since August 1994, it is too soon to evaluate the federal agencies' policies and procedures to ensure the accuracy of nutrition information on labels. Although FSIS will use information from its enforcement program to evaluate the effectiveness of its policies and procedures, unlike FDA, it does not plan to statistically assess the overall accuracy of the nutrition information on labels for meat and poultry. Without such an assessment, the federal government may be unable to evaluate the effectiveness of its nutrition labeling program for all products in the marketplace.

GAO found that: (1) although FDA and FSIS regulations clearly specify the level of accuracy necessary for the nutrient values provided on the new labels, food companies have a great deal of flexibility in developing these nutrient values; (2) FDA and FSIS help ensure that the nutritional information on food labels is accurate by performing laboratory analyses, conducting visual reviews, and pursuing legal actions against companies that have products with violative labels; (3) FDA and FSIS enforcement efforts are hindered by the great number of nutrition labels that must be examined and limited resources; (4) FDA and FSIS plan to use the results of its testing and enforcement activities to monitor the food industry's response to the new nutrition labeling regulations; (5) FDA plans to evaluate the effectiveness of its labeling policies and procedures by conducting a periodic survey of food industry compliance; (6) resource constraints have prevented FSIS from statistically assessing the effectiveness of its labeling policies and procedures; and (7) the federal government will not be able to evaluate the effectiveness of its nutrition labeling program for all nutrition labels in the marketplace without a statistical assessment of FSIS label enforcement efforts.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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