In-depth Meat Content (Official Meat QUID)

QUID Food Labelling

Meat content calculations are a very useful NutriCalc feature available to subscribers of the Professional Plus and Premium Plans, that save users doing the often-nightmarish calculations by hand.

Prior to the UK Meat Products Regulations 2003, practically any part of an animal added to a food product, including bone, could be declared as meat. Those Regulations, however, exclude various parts of the animal including offal (kidney, liver etc.) as well as mechanically-recovered meat (MRM) from being included in the meat declaration.

The Regulations now restrict the amount of fat and connective tissue that can be present in the meat component of the food. And excess fat and/or connective tissue now needs to be put into the ingredient declaration.

So, if your product only contains 90VL beef, that will all be taken as beef, but for 40VL beef, you will need to declare beef, beef fat and beef connective tissue. In all cases, the % of beef in the product must be ‘QUIDed’ in the ingredient declaration.

Connective tissue is obtained from the protein and collagen content for the meat.

NutriCalc provides a list of over 400 ingredients for many cuts of meat with various VL ratios for beef, lamb, mutton and pork.

It also has various cuts for chicken and turkey, such as breast, leg, skin and thigh. These can be entered into the recipe and the ingredient declaration obtained shows a report for meat content, together with inclusion of the meats in the ingredient declaration.

You can also use these meat ingredients in recipes to obtain nutrition calculations in the usual way.

[VL = visual: lean ratio (if a cut of meat has a VL ratio of 90, this means it visually shows 90% fat. This does NOT mean that the fat content is 10%; there is fat also in the lean part)]

n.b: QUID = quantitative ingredient declaration