News

Australian supermarket Coles has announced that 100 per cent of its private label (home brand) products are being re-labelled to make life easier for customers with food allergies.

As part of 2012 Food Allergy Awareness Week, GS1 Australia has announced an iPhone app that gives consumers access to extended labelling product data. The GS1 GoScan was launched yesterday and will be available from September.

The National Food Allergy Awareness Week, to raise awareness about food allergies in Australia, was launched in Sydney yesterday (14 May 2012) by NSW Minister for Primary Industries and Small Business, Katrina Hodgkinson.

‘GS1 Recallnet’ is a standardised, industry-driven communication tool enabling organisations of any size to share real-time product recall and withdrawal notifications with their trading partners and regulators. GS1 Australia is hosting a series of webinars until the beginning of December to train the Australian food industry in the new food recall system.

An investigation has been conducted into whether wines fined with egg, milk and fish have the potential to provoke clinical allergic reactions in sensitised patients. The researchers used wine produced in-house using different concentrations of casein, egg albumin and isinglass as fining agents. The fining agents were not detectable in the end product when tested using the available laboratory methods.

Researchers now based in Western Australia have published a free-access report on the most frequent food allergens causing immediate reactions in Swiss children of different age groups.