What the label has to carry
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The five
- Statement of identity. What the product is, in a name somebody recognizes.
- Net quantity. A claim about every jar.
- Ingredients, in descending order by weight.
- Allergens, declared as required.
- Name and place of business of the responsible party.
The ingredient list is longer than you think
A sauce has more ingredients than most preserved products, and the acid is one of them. That has a packaging consequence: the panel has to fit the list, which is a reason to settle the jar before the label rather than after, and a reason a tall narrow jar can be the wrong answer.
Order the labels last
Net quantity depends on the jar and the fill, and the ingredient list depends on a formulation that is still moving while you are testing. Labels ordered early are labels reprinted.
What a sauce label is tempted to say
Heat claims, health claims and provenance claims, roughly in that order. A scale of heat is a marketing statement and is largely unregulated; a health claim is a regulated one and the fact that something appeared in a study does not make it available to you. Words like natural and authentic are not free of meaning simply because they are not precisely defined.
Allergens are easy to miss in a sauce
Soy, wheat, fish and sesame turn up in sauces through ingredients that do not announce themselves: soy sauce in a teriyaki, anchovy in a worcestershire base, tahini in a dressing. The declaration follows the ingredient rather than the recipe name, so a formulation change that looks minor can change what the label must say. Check it at the point the formulation is fixed, not at the point the labels are ordered.
Keep the label artwork and the formulation sheet in the same place and dated together. The failure mode is a recipe that moved and a label that did not, which is a labeling error rather than a production one and is harder to spot because nothing about the jar looks wrong.