0:00
Thanks for joining today's webinar, which is about the use of nutritional software in the reformulation process, hosted with our professional affiliate member Trace Games NutriCalc.
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I work for FTF Scotland's reformulation health program, which provides support for Scottish SMA food and drink manufacturers to make their products healthier.
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I'm joined today by Dave King from NutriCalc, who will give us an introduction to software, and a live run-through of how to use it for reviewing and adjusting a recipe.
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This is the first of two webinars that we're hosting with Nutricelp.
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The next will provide a deeper dive on how to use the software to its best potential.
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Following today's webinar, you'll receive an aftercare email containing a recording of this webinar and a link to register for the next, and I do hope to see many of you there.
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So, I will start off with the topic of reformulation, and then I'll hand over to Dave to show us how to use NutriCalc.
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There will be a Q &A at the end of the session, so please use the option on your screen to submit a question, and we'll answer as many of these as we can at the end of the webinar.
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I'm just waiting for my slides to click through.
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So, in 2018, the Scottish Government published the A Healthier Future report, which identified how the Government could partner with organisations in the public and private sector to help people make healthier choices around food.
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This led to the establishment of the reformulation for health programme aimed at making food and drink products available for purchase healthier.
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We worked to address the common challenges that manufacturers will come up if they want to reformulate.
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Some are shown on the screen, but you'll know there can be many more.
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We understand and we love the food industry.
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We'll chip in wherever we can to provide help at various stages of the process.
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We work to the eight principles of reformulation shown on the bottom of the screen.
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These have been developed in line with the Scottish dietary goals.
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So we have the reduction of sugar, fat and salt, but also positive nutrition with increasing fibre, fruits and veg.
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There are push and pull factors for reformulation.
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Some brands know that their customers are looking for healthier products, or maybe they manufacture for a retailer who's requesting healthier products for their stores.
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Others have reformulated to meet Public Health England salt or calorie targets, or it could be that products are prepared for the food service, being served in the out-of-home sector, now subject to mandatory calorie labelling. There's one here that I want to highlight.
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That is the promotional restrictions to products classed as high in fat, salt or sugar, known generally using the acronym HFFS.
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It's a number of restrictions on the advertisements, shelving locations and promotional deals for such products.
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The legislation has been gradually implemented in England over the past few years, and it will be introduced in Scotland next year.
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The classification to distinguish if a product is HFSS uses the nutrient profile model or NPM.
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This is a scoring system which balances out the contribution made by the most beneficial nutrients, particularly important in a child's diet.
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So that's fruits, nuts, veg, fibre, and protein with those that children should be eating less of.
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So that's saturated fat, sugar, and sodium.
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If a food product scores four or more, or if a drink product scores one or more, then it is classed as HFSS.
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and if it's also in one of the affected product categories then it will be subject to these restrictions.
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I've included a QR code on the screen there which will take you to the HFSS toolkit page created by FDF.
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Members of FDF please remember to log in to access the additional member only resources on the website but open to everybody there is some very useful information here. We also have a reformulation toolkit which is open for everyone to use.
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This has been set up to cater for all experience levels from complete beginner to technical resources that even get used by our academic partners.
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We have for example condensed guidance sheets on the salt and calorie targets, technical guides to reformulation and sensory analysis and an advice tool which will generate tailored guidance for your product based on your reformulation goals.
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On this screen, I've pulled out some podcast and webinar topics to show you how we've curated the topics to cater for specific categories and specific reformulation concerns.
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For the podcasts, if you search on FTF Scotland on your preferred podcast platform, then you'll able to access them all and we've had some great guest speakers on here from all corners of the industry who have been really generous with their knowledge so I would definitely recommend checking these out.
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Now the reason why we have so many industry experts to collaborate with is thanks to our reformulate partnership.
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This is our network of key players in the industry who can influence or support reformulation, so of course that's the manufacturers themselves, but also the ingredient suppliers who can provide and help in recipe development using alternative or innovative ingredients.
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Also the organisations requesting or serving healthier products, they need to understand what's involved when they make a supplier request for a healthier product and they can influence in serving or stocking reformulated products and all the other organisations as well such as research, academia, NGOs and beyond who provide a wealth of resources, support and steer within the industry.
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Here are some of our partners, you'll see the wide variety of organisations reflected within the logos.
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We currently have 89 organisations the partnership, all ready and willing to provide a helping hand to the cause.
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You don't have to be based in Scotland to join the partnership, so if you do have an expertise that can help make Scotland's products and people healthier, you can join the partnership on our webpage. We've partnered with some of these in facilitating student placements.
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There have been some great food science courses in Scotland and we've placed 16 students into industry to help with a reformulation project.
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This provides the manufacturer with an extra pair of hands to help out with the workload and gives the students invaluable industry experience, particularly in reformulation.
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Again, if this is something you'd like to get involved with, do get in touch.
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There are associated costs with reformulating, from buying the ingredients for trial runs, paying for consultant advice, nutritional analysis or sensory analysis.
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To help with this, we've developed a number of funds providing up to £5 ,000 for a manufacturer to involve, to invest in the process.
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The first fund we provided used our own underspend thanks to Covid and since then the funding has come from Scotland Food and Drink and Food Standards Scotland and we are so grateful for that support.
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Our core fund, the Reformulate Challenge Fund, has supported a wide range of projects across all categories, and we've also provided some bespoke funds, such as the Healthier Bakery Fund and Healthier Food Service Fund, both funded by Food Standards Scotland, supporting those areas of industry following specific activities.
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The Healthier Product Innovation Fund was developed in partnership with Interface, using funding from Scotland Food and Drink, to support more technical projects where the funding went directly to an academic partner to carry out the work on behalf of the manufacturer.
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We recently closed applications for the fifth round of the Reformulate Challenge Fund, so be announcing the successful applicants soon.
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With the funding, we actually were not guaranteed to receive any money to pass on for the funds, which is why we're so grateful to our current partners and we'd love to work with additional funding partners to help create more opportunities for industry support. So, all of this work, what's the end product?
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Well, it's healthier foods on shelves and things. I've picked out some headline projects, there are many, many more.
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I want to give you a reminder that these projects were supported by a very modest £5 ,000 of funding.
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A range of innovative projects on some well-loved and commonly consumed products.
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If you imagine a day's worth of meals and snacks containing these reformulated options, the consolidated dietary benefits are great.
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So if you are a manufacturer in Scotland or a potential reformulate partner elsewhere in the UK, do get in touch with our email address on the screen or follow the QR code to our webpage.
10:35
So that's provided you with some background on reformulation and the support needed by industry if we're expecting them to reformulate.
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I'll hand over to Dave now to show us how to use the NeutraCalc software within this process.
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Thank you, Harriet.
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It's nice to meet everyone.
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I just want to start off by saying thank you to FDF Scotland for having us along today and then allowing us to partner with this project.
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As Harriet said, I am from the TraceGains NeutraCalc team, so today I'm just going to give you a brief overview of NeutraCalc of TraceGains and a high-level overview of how to use the software.
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So NutriCalc, for over three decades, NutriCalc has been the go-to nutritional calculation software for food and beverage innovators, trusted by brands to get product data right every time.
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In 2024, we joined forces with TraceGains, the world's leading network software ecosystem for the food and beverage industry.
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This partnership means NutriCalc isn't just a powerful stand-alone tool.
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It's now part of a connected platform that streamlines everything from ingredient sourcing and MPD to compliance and sustainability.
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Together, NeutraCalc and TraceGains empowers teams to work faster, smarter, and more collaboratively, removing the roadblocks between great ideas and successful product launches.
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A little bit about TraceGains, quick look.
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TraceGains were founded in 2008, and we've grown fast by tackling one of the toughest problems in food and beverage, data.
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Our platform connects over 100 ,000 supplier locations globally and digitizes more than 9 million documents.
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Because making smarter decisions faster means having the right data in the right time.
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But what really sets us apart We're not an outsider to retrofit, trying to retrofit solutions into the world.
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Trace Games was built inside this industry by people who have walked the same factory floors, sat through the same audits, designed and launched new products, and navigated the same regulatory chaos.
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A team of over 140 professionals, both experienced from across our industry, from R &D and procurement to quality and regulatory.
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So when we say we understand your pain points, it's not just empathy, it's experience.
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And unlike those off-the-shelf systems that need months of customizations and still don't quite fit, we built TraceGains to work with the way you work, right out of the box and to benefit the entire industry.
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So where does NutriCalc fit in the ecosystem?
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Quick look at this screen here.
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Our ecosystem isn't just a list of integrations.
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It's a strategic network designed to support every phase of product development.
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From early concept to scale up and commercialization.
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It's not patchwork of tools.
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It's a curated modular ecosystem designed to help you innovate faster, reduce risk and make better decisions across the entire product lifestyle.
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This connected digital thread is what makes AI powered insights possible, not someday, but now.
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We also know that not a single platform can do everything.
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So we're working with specialist data partners to solve the critical gaps as well.
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Okay, so trace games and NutriCalc, free to use of NutriCalc and to accelerate NPD.
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So you were speeding up your sourcing of ingredients Before going into NutriCount, I just want to highlight this.
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There's a free resource for everyone to use.
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This TraceGains Gather.
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So it's a network ingredient marketplace.
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You can source all your recipes, ingredients and related documentation, which is going to save you a lot of time.
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The suppliers are ranked and trusted suppliers and you can compare specs using standardized forms so everything looks the same.
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And on the other side of that as well, you can promote your own products to potential buyers, all completely free of charge.
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So I do recommend going up to TraceGainsGather and getting your free gather account as well.
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Looking at NutriCalc, setting the industry standard for over 30 years. What do we mean?
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So we were developed by an experienced food scientist and food lab test manager, Dr. David Bartley, over 30 years ago.
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He built NutriCalc as a time-saving solution to generate nutrition results quicker than lab testing.
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And the industry standard for calculation software with the highest nutrition accuracy.
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I'm going to go over a very high level of what NutriCalc does in a demonstration in a little bit.
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And we'll go further into further detail with that as well.
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So we're looking at a cutting-edge online new product development and reformulation solution.
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You can put your data into NutriCalc and get your results instantly.
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We're gonna help drive precision with reformulation in-house and achieve HFSS compliance with unrivaled speeds.
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We have success stories from across England already with this.
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It can instantly generate detailed nutrient profile and HFSS scores to fine tune saturated fat, sugar and salt levels.
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A quick look at what NutriCalc looks like.
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On the left-hand screen, what we have here is an example of a recipe that we're going to rebuild in NutriCalc in a minute.
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And on the right-hand side, what we can see is just a copy of one of our reports outlying what we've got is the nutrition breakdown, your ingredient declaration, allergens, and what we're used to seeing as a front of pack as well.
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We'll go over reformulation.
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This is the HFSS scoring sites.
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As we can see from the product on the left, we have a HFSS score of nine, so that's non-compliant.
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And after reformulating it, we've got a score of three, which will become a compliant product.
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EU used something called a NutriScore, which we'll also go over ever so quickly.
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But everything you need to bring a product to market is held within NutriCalc.
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On the left here, we see both a per 100 gram and a per serving size, and breaking that into what we normally see on the front of pack.
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NutriCalc is simple and transparent.
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Scalable as businesses grow, from food startups to international FMCG corporations, anyone can use NutriCalc.
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We have affordable, flexible, both annually and monthly pay-as-you-go plans.
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The monthly plans pay-as-you-go is a really good point.
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There are no contracts to that.
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And there's no hidden extras.
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You get unlimited recipes, unlimited data, are limited labels and limited support on the use of NutriCalc itself.
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Powering trace schemes, nutrition calculation, and labeling.
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So there's basically three ways that you can use NutriCalc.
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You can have it as used by FDF here as a standalone solution.
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Without a network behind it, put in your recipe, your details, and we'll provide those instant results straight away.
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You can use it as a standalone solution connected for an API into TraceGain Supply Management Solution.
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What does that mean?
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One of the Supply Management Solution that TraceGain uses is, it will bring in all of your data specific to what you're making in your recipes.
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With an API, we can combine that together just to make that even quicker and even more accurate.
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And then lastly, we're showing here TraceGain's Formula Management Solution, which is powered by NutriCalc integrated within the TraceGain system.
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So you can combine your full MPD process in one platform, which you can share across your entire team.
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Just to make note as well on my API solution, that will connect into any ERP system that you may use as well.
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So now we're going to go into a live demonstration of NutriCalc.
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Okay, so here we have NutriCalc.
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NutriCalc is made up of three main areas.
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At the top we have our recipe center, which we are currently in.
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The next one down we have is our ingredient center, and then we have all your settings, supports, help and support at the bottom.
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Where we're going to start off today is in our ingredient center.
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The first thing that I want to do is show you what NutriCalc is made up of.
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So UK Ingredients, UK EU, McCants and Whiddison, the Composite of Foods integrated data set.
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Secondly, we have our supplementary file, your e-numbers, your processing aids, emulsifiers, et cetera.
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And then we have a lot of the United States Department of Agriculture files.
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Currently got those switched off, so let's just switch that on so we can search up.
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And the reason why I want to show you that is if I use vanilla, we can see vanilla extract down here is in the USDA ingredients.
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It's not actually already within our UK data set.
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So just by clicking and searching in USDA, you will bring up the vanilla.
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What I will show you is how to input your own ingredient.
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And what I'm going to put in today is a No V Honey.
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So, it's a honey substitute.
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Now, this could be a finished good that you already buy in.
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And the labeling name will need to be put in.
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Therefore, I've just copied in a labeling name of something that I'm working with already.
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And now we're going to go to our nutrients.
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A lot of our suppliers supplies us with these details already.
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I will always let NutriCalc do the maths for you.
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So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna go down through NutriCalc, starting with our macronutrients.
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Now, the biggest thing to notice here is that most of the times, a supplier will give us a salt value in milligrams.
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We need a sodium value in NutriCalc.
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Sorry, it's usually given to us in grams.
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We need it in milligrams.
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we usually get given everything in grams for salt.
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So first of all, move your decimal point over a couple of places and let NeutraCalc calculate the sodium value from the salt value.
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And we've also have a moisture value down here.
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And we'll just put in the energy values as well.
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Now these warning triangles are there to help let NeutraCalc do those maths for us.
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Now we're gonna put in our allergens.
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The quickest way to do that is just to quickly click this button and then go down and add anything that isn't allergen already.
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There isn't anything within this product so we can just quickly move on.
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And now I've added that nutrient to my, that ingredient to my database.
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I'm also going to just verify that ingredient.
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So I get a nice green shield here.
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Now we're going to make a recipe.
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So today I'm gonna copy that spiced bun recipe that we saw in our presentation a minute ago.
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And I'm gonna call this a Thursday spiced bun.
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The description, that's internal notes to yourselves.
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Let's start off then making our recipe.
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Start off with one and a half cups of Guinness.
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I'm gonna put in some molasses.
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If you're dropping this down, you've got various measures that you can use.
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Honey, four tablespoons of honey, it's unsalted.
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And again, we're gonna put in four tablespoons of butter.
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Flour, would always recommend using whatever flour that you have, put that into NutriCalc yourself.
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Just for the sake of the demonstration, I'm gonna use some standard data here.
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Flour is very variable, so it's always a good idea.
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Along with chocolate, because they're available between manufacturers, put in what you're using yourself.
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I'm going to start putting in some spices as well.
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Hopefully, you guys can see how quickly it is to build your recipe in NutriCalc done cinnamon and how easy it is to use and all the different measurements that we've got available.
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And lastly, I'm going to put in some sugar.
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I'm going to use some Demara sugar for this.
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Let me change that, sorry.
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So I can use my cup.
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And I'm just going to quickly save that as I go along.
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So there's my recipe.
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Now, I need to define a cook loss.
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There's a couple of ways that we can do this.
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First of all, I'm going to highlight a cook loss.
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Now we may already know the percentage of moisture that is driven off during our cooking process.
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If not, we may know our final moisture weight.
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If not, don't worry.
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What we can do is neutral calc will add up the weight of the raw ingredients.
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Cook it, let it cool.
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How much does it weigh afterwards?
27:46
Okay, we'll also need to define a serving size as well.
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Now as per law, obviously your results are gonna come out in per 100 grams, but we can actually break that down even further.
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And I can say that my spiced bun is actually meant to be a 30 gram per slice.
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And then we use that on our packaging.
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So let's quickly save that actually.
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At this point as well, I'm going to put in an image in my product here and I'll show you why in a second. Let's just save as we go along. Nutrition.
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So our first page is a breakdown of all of our macro micronutrients, as we can see, and just by dropping these down we can see what ingredient is providing the most.
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Unless you're a maths genius, wouldn't back of Ben trying to work out your HFSS scores from here.
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So we have our UK back of pack, which is exportable by your three dots here.
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Front of pack if you want it per slice.
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Again, we are exportable by our three dots.
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Just gonna change my methodology quickly.
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Okay, our ingredient declaration and quantitative ingredient declaration.
29:15
Ah, brilliant, we have some allergens missing.
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So let's take a look at the missing data, shall we?
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Okay, so again, it's nice when this happens because I get to show you what you need to do.
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Not suitable for vegans, honey, but butter unsalted.
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We contain not suitable and we also contain milk.
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So, when this comes up in your scenarios, you can see how quick and easy it is just to put these back to where they were, all right?
30:33
I have done this on purpose so that you can see the full scale of everything as well.
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And that's just showing you the extra that we offer.
31:17
I think it was also asking for a labeling name of some sort.
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So now we can see our allergens have come up here.
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But again, let's just make sure all of our data is correct.
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I'm just gonna paste this in here for now.
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Now, we have our ingredient declaration.
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We can mess about a little bit with our allergens.
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We can show in line, we can show below.
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We can make them uppercase, we can make them bold, or we can make them bold in uppercase.
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We can order ingredients by its precooked or by its post-cooked.
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You can also insert your quids as well to bring up your percentages.
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as well, and this is exportable by your three dots.
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You want to take this one step further, we can copy our declaration, we can give a custom title here, and we can say what we want it to say, and we just save up.
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This becomes important, I'll show you why in a second.
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I've mentioned Nutri Score already, that's the European version of everything.
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Let's take a look at some reports.
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Now, the reason why I've gone over that is because we have a UK combined report, which is everything you need in one place.
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You have your back of pack, you have the product image that we put in earlier, you have your ingredient declarations, your allergens, your friends of pack, what macronutrient is providing the most of the energy, and your EU reference intakes on our micronutrients.
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In the moment, we are putting through the standard declaration.
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Let's pull through our custom declaration and here we have it.
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Why is that important?
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This becomes your spec group.
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Again, exportable via your three dots.
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Now obviously, we're here today to talk about reformulation as well.
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You can see all the different types of reports that we have available within NutriCalc.
33:59
Let's take a look at our HFSS.
34:01
Oh no, we've got a score of 13.
34:03
That's not really a good product, is it?
34:06
Going back to what Harriet said a little bit earlier, we need a score of three or less.
34:12
So let's see how easy it is to reformulate this recipe.
34:17
Now, I'm not gonna put this all in again.
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What I'm going to do is I'm gonna click these three dots and I'm gonna create a copy.
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So I've now got a copy of Thursday's Spice Bun.
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I'm just gonna rename it.
34:33
I was going to call it reduced Thursday surprise bun.
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And let's take a look.
34:39
We know from our example earlier that our honey and our sugar was providing the most to our HFSS results.
34:47
So I'm going to delete our honey to begin with.
34:54
It's convenient that I put in a no bee honey earlier, wasn't it?
35:01
And that was, I'm going to put in the same amount, 88.25 grams.
35:07
And let's reduce our sugar down as well.
35:11
So we can see what it's like.
35:17
Just gonna check our details, make sure our cook loss has fallen through.
35:20
It's pulled through along with our recipe serving size.
35:25
We can go back into our reports.
35:29
We can find our nutrient profile report.
35:32
We can still see, ah, we're not quite there just yet.
35:38
what else is providing the most?
35:42
Maybe a bit of butter.
35:47
Our sugars are still really high.
35:50
And we can see that our raisins are providing that as well.
35:53
So let's go back into our recipe.
35:55
We don't want to compromise that recipe too much, but let's just try and reduce down our amount of raisins that we have.
36:10
And then we can keep seeing until we get our results that we need.
36:21
So as you can see, reformulating a recipe to get your desired results straight away is easy.
36:42
Just by looking at our nutrients, what is causing the issue?
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What can we do about it?
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And just by going in and refiguring our results, we can then start to build up a compliant product and your results are instantly generated for you.
37:24
I hope that has shown you how quick and how easy it is to use NutriCalc.
37:30
And any questions that, you know, we can bring that all together for us in our question section.
37:40
I'm just going to bring back to our slideshow.
37:55
That's perfect, although it has put me in the mood for going to escape.
37:58
Apologies if anybody else has been affected by this.
38:02
We were really pleased to have the opportunity to work with NeutraCalc for this webinar because it's the software that I use a lot.
38:10
So it's really great to have the opportunity to let everybody have eyes on how the system works and what information to have ready before using it.
38:20
So thank you so much for showing us around. We do have a few questions. So Dave, can you tell us, would the software calculate free sugars?
38:33
So when it comes to free sugars and added sugars, as long as the data is already within NutriCalc, i.e.
38:41
you're adding that ingredient into yourself and there is a section there that says added sugars. As long as that is completed, yes, yes it will.
38:53
Perfect. Once you've put in your recipe information into NutriCalc, how secure would that be?
39:01
So NutriCalc is protected by 256-bit encryption.
39:08
It's one of the highest standards you can of encryption data. Not only that, a live subscription is also protected by two-factor authentication.
39:20
Perfect. So it's very safe.
39:23
Exactly, yeah. We use Microsoft and Google authenticators on your smartphones.
39:28
And if you want to get going with NutriCalc, are there any computer system requirements that you need to have, Freddie?
39:36
No, as long as your laptop or tablet It has internet connection.
39:40
You can just head to nutricalc.co.uk, sign up for the seventh day free trial there.
39:47
You'll get two free recipes.
39:48
And then any ongoing subscriptions, there's nothing else for them to do.
39:52
There's no download into any software.
39:55
It's all client-based.
39:58
You've answered my final question, which was about cost.
40:03
Obviously, it's so key to manufacturers at the time, at the moment.
40:07
so that's great to hear.
40:10
I think that covers everything, so thank you again for sharing your expertise and showing us how useful the Nutri-Calc software can be in allowing you to check out your recipes and providing you with some direction before you enter the test kitchen.
40:31
So if you are a manufacturer based in Scotland, please do get in touch.
40:35
We are here to help future proof your products as health becomes more and more of a priority with consumers and also policy makers.
40:44
So it really is something that more and more people are going to have to start looking into.
40:50
So please keep an eye out for our follow-up email.
40:54
You've got contact details for Dave on the screen there and you'll receive more information in the email and I hope to see you at the next webinar. Thank you.