Your Beer Will Soon Receive Clearer Nutritional Information
Beer is sometimes referred to as “liquid bread,” but the only way to know if it really matches its nutritional value is to find it, since beer usually doesn’t have a label. This is about to change for some of your favorite beers.
The Beer Institute , an industry group made up of many major beer producers (including Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors ), announced that it will provide calorie, carbohydrate, protein, fat and alcohol by volume (ABV) labels on beer labels. In the so-called voluntary disclosure initiative of the brewer, they will also include a “freshness date” or production date, as well as a list of ingredients on the label itself, on the packaging, on the website, or via a QR code. the code. This comes at a time when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires alcoholic beverages to have a separate calorie count on restaurant menus.
The food label on all beer is (currently) not law, but many of the participating brewers – Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, HeinekenUSA, Constellation Brands Beer Division, North American Breweries, and Craft Brew Alliance – have agreed to abide by the rules by the end of 2020. Collectively these companies produce more than 81 percent of the volume of beer sold in the United States. This means that not all beer will be nutritionally labeled, although in a similar vein, the FDA mandated craft beer to be nutritionally labeled by December 2016 .
Voluntary Disclosure Initiative | Beer Institute