On March 26, 2024, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) of China announced several detailed guidelines, encouraging food businesses to improve the labeling of production dates and shelf lives on prepackaged food products, including food additives.

Special food is a key category of prepackaged foods, should be in accordance with the provisions of the Food Safety Law of the People's Republic of China and other regulations and standards, under the premise of consistency with the registered or filed label instructions of special food, encourage special food enterprises to implement the requirements in the Announcement, as far as possible to optimize the labeling of production date and shelf life of special food. At the same time, the Announcement complements the requirements of the Guidelines for Health Food Warning Word and the Guidelines for the Labeling of Food for Special Medical Purpose (hereinafter referred to as the Guidelines), hope that special food enterprises on the basis of the requirements of the Announcement, combine with the Guidelines to design product labels.

The Announcement encourages food manufacturers to follow the below guides: the production date and shelf life of prepackaged foods should be prominently displayed on the principal display panel of the smallest sales package. For multi-layered smallest sales packages, these dates should also be indicated on the outermost packaging; if the dates are labeled in the form of "see a certain location of the packaging", the location should be clear and easy to find, with an accurate description; characters, digits, and symbols on the labels should be no less than 3 mm in height, with a height-to-width ratio not exceeding 3:1; the production date and the shelf life should be marked distinctly in contrasting colors, such as black text on a white background; the expiration date of the shelf life should be marked in the order of the year, month, and day; for packages containing multiple individual prepackaged foods, the expiration date should be marked according to the earliest expiring item, or each item's expiration date should be individually noted on the outer packaging; for prepackaged foods produced in a subdivided manner, both the production date of the subdivided food and the subdivision date should be labeled, with the shelf-lifeexpiration date marked according to the expiration date of subdivided product; the authority calls for the improvement of date marking technologies such as jet coding and printing to ensure that the labeled content remains durable and clear.

The labeling of production date and shelf life of health food is suggested to be in the order of year, month and day, and may be separated by space, slash, hyphen, full stop, etc. or without separator. The year number should be marked with 4 digits, and the month and day should be marked with 2 digits respectively. The shelf life of health food is described in the form of "the expiration date is XXXX year XX month XX day".

Source: SAMR & Chemlinked

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