An investigation of dozens of food companies by the Food and Drug Administration has found that in spite of strict labeling laws, as many as 25 percent of manufacturers failed to list common ingredients that can cause potentially fatal allergic reactions.
The labeling omissions may pose a threat to the approximately 7 million Americans who suffer from food allergies and who rely on a product's packaging to keep them safe, according to the FDA.
In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the amount of food recalled from store shelves for containing allergy-provoking ingredients, like peanuts and eggs, that were not listed on the product's label. Worried about the trend, the FDA enlisted the support of state regulators in Minnesota and Wisconsin to undertake a series of inspections at food plants during the past two years, trying to grasp the extent of the problem and correct it at the source.
The agency examined 85 companies of all sizes that were likely to use common allergy triggers in abundance: cookie makers, candy companies and ice cream manufacturers. Its report, which was completed earlier this year, found that a quarter of the companies made products with raw ingredients like nuts, but omitted them from the labels describing the food.
Only slightly more than half of the manufacturers actually checked their products to ensure that all of the ingredients were accurately reflected on the labels, the report said, making it more difficult for consumers to know which foods might trigger allergic reactions that may be life-threatening.
"The fact that ingredient listings can be dead wrong certainly points to major shortfalls in food safety," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The accuracy of a label can really save a life."
As awareness of the problem grows, manufacturers say they are paying more attention to what goes into their products, but it is often difficult for them to know when ingredients that can provoke a reaction, called allergens, manage to slip into the food chain undetected.
In fact, many of the "hidden" allergens found in the FDA study were not deliberately added, but wound up in sweets because bakers routinely used the same utensils to stir separate mixes, or reused baking sheets without washing them between batches.