Vegan Product Integrity

The growing plant-based movement – especially for vegan products – presents many challenges for the food industry. Understanding the different requirements for regulatory compliance and the best practices for manufacturing, in order to label your product ‘vegan’, is key to ensuring success in innovation.

VEGAN TECHNICAL SUPPORT SERVICES

FACTS has extensive background and expertise in allergen management and species control. This has equipped us with the necessary insight and skills to address and manage vegan products produced in facilities that are shared with animal-based products. Our focus is to help you formulate rational, simple, and effective control plans that fit into your current food safety systems.

FACTS is your expert partner, and we offer consultation services. We are passionate about working with you, our client, to help you meet your vegan product integrity objectives.

VEGAN REGULATORY AND LABELLING REQUIREMENTS

Our team, which includes consulting registered dietitians and food scientists, will help you with applying the South African food regulations to ensure that your food labels comply. Read more on our regulatory and nutritional services that will support vegan certification.

With the current shift towards vegan diets, there has been notable consumer (and consequently, food industry) attentiveness towards vegan-related food products.
Our diverse team of regulatory experts will help you with applying the South African food regulations to ensure that your food labels comply.

We can assist with:

  • Providing the minimum requirements for label development
  • Ensuring that final labels are compliant with all relevant legislation
  • Checking compliance with DoH, DALRRD, and DTIC regulations

In addition to this, FACTS can use and apply our regulatory knowledge and our nutrition expertise to assist you in New Product Development.

Some areas in which we can add value are:

  • Compositional requirements
  • Nutritional calculations
  • Evaluating the permissibility of ingredients and proposed claims

VEGAN TESTING SERVICES

Testing is a tool commonly used by industry to substantiate a labelling claim, to validate manufacturing controls (such as cleaning) or to support certification requirements.
Validation and verification are both best supplemented with appropriate analysis.

Vegan product integrity testing for validation: As part of our vegan product integrity management support services, we offer a comprehensive range of food testing procedures:

Vegan product screen

FACTS have developed a unique vegan product screen which tests for a comprehensive range of animal and animal-derived ingredients, including animal meat and milk, egg, gelatine, fish and shellfish. This unparalleled and inclusive test offers an effective, sensitive and targeted solution to ensure vegan product integrity.

Vegan wine screen

Since we understand the complex nature of food – and that one test does not fit all circumstances – we have also created a vegan product screen specifically for wine. This highly selective and sensitive test screens for all the popular animal-derived fining agents used in the production of wine, such as casein (milk), tropomyosin (shellfish), ovalbumin and lysozyme (egg), gelatine (bovine, fish or pork), and isinglass (fish).

Species and allergen testing

FACTS also offers industry-leading allergen and species testing services to help support and supplement testing requirements and objectives.

RAPID ON-SITE TESTING KITS FOR VERIFICATION 

Rapid kits are ideal for on-site analysis because they are quick, mobile, cost-effective, require little technical skill to operate, and in most cases require no additional equipment.
FACTS offers a range of curated rapid on-site testing kits, which have been selected based on their technical performance and ease of use. The following kits provided by FACTS can support with verifying cleaning controls for managing and preventing cross-contamination of animal-based products with vegan products:

  • Protein swab kits
  • Raw meat species kits
  • Specific milk, egg, fish and shellfish test kits

If you are interested in our services, please contact us.