In August, the Australia New Zealand Food Authority (ANZFA) launched a range of user guides to help businesses, retailers and food officers to interpret and apply the new joint Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code.  There are twelve plain English guides cover a range of labelling issues, food additives, meat and meat products, microbiological limits, methods of analysis and metal contaminants. In addition a guideline on labelling for genetically modified foods is available. These are available in PDF format directly from the ANZFA website (http://www.anzfa.gov.au) following the Food Standards Code trail or going directly to http://www.anzfa.gov.au/foodstandards/userguides/index.cfm. ANZFA also plan to release a package to assist users with nutritional labelling. This includes a user guide and free internet based nutritional panel calculator. This calculator allows the recipe to be entered for any food and will print out a nutritional information panel for that food. The finalisation of this nutritional panel calculator was reliant on a minor amendment to the Food Standards Code, which allow carbohydrate to be calculated by two methods: the current 'by difference' and the more up to date method 'by analysis'.
Reference: Food Australia Volume 53 (10) -October, 2001.