Quantitative ingredient declaration

The declaration of the quantity of key ingredients (fruit or fruit juice in soft drinks) has become law through quantitative ingredient declaration regulations in Europe, and where artificial sweeteners and carbohydrates are used together, an appropriate statement is necessary. A warning about the product being a source of phenylalanine must be incorporated when aspartame is used as a sweetener. 

The Regulations also require a quantitative ingredient declaration (QUID) generally to be given for those ingredients that ... 

It is of course of interest to determine which of the methods of quantitation provides the most accurate and precise quantitative data. It is equally important to consider the constant trade-off for precision and sensitivity. At very low concentrations, precision often becomes limited by extraneous factors, such as wall effects. In such cases, high-precision measurements are becoming virtually unobtainable. In analogy to the Quantitative Ingredient Declarations (QUID) in food analysis, which require statements as to the uncertainty of the measurement and the variability of the results (sampling ), also for industrial polymer analysis intra- and interlaboratory variation and the meaning of average analytical results needs to be established. It is the responsibility of the analyst to adequately describe the instrumentation and performance to duplicate the repeatability and accuracy of the developed method. 

The declaration must be shown as a percentage, must appear in or next to the name of the food (or in the ingredients list), and will usually be based on the amount of the ingredient used in the preparation of the food. A spreadable fat marketed on the basis that it contains olive oil, for example, should provide a quantitative indication of how much olive oil has been used in its manufacture. Omission of this information could be misleading as the consumer may assume justifiably that the entire fat of the product is derived from olive oil when this is, in fact, not the case. 

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