“Clean” Labels Must Also Mean Safe Foods

There has recently been an increased interest in cooking, as evidenced by the increase in the number of televised cooking shows, internet articles on cooking shortcuts and books describing the unique personal connections people have with the art of cooking. The interest in cooking has also increased the consumer’s desire to understand more about the ingredients that go into made-from-scratch food, or processed food. At the same time, consumers in this complex technological era seem to be searching for simplicity in the food products they consume. To address consumer concerns and requests for food products that contain easy-to-understand ingredients, food manufacturing companies have worked to produce a “clean” label, which at its core, is the concept that the ingredients added to food are recognizable or, at the least, with few to no ingredients that are labeled as preservatives, additives, artificial or have multi-syllabic “chemical”-sounding names.

All areas of the food industry are working to modify proc