Vegetarian Diet Rules

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How you can help improving Vegetarian support in Open Food Facts

• Annotate Vegan and Vegetarian logos using Hunger Games
• Improve and translate our ingredient taxonomies if you spot a misdetection. English, French… already have good support, but many languages don't.

Vegetarian Diet Rules in detail

The European Vegetarian Society has listed detailed rules, which must be complied to in order to obtain the label. These are reproduced below:

The following products are excluded from the use of the V-Label:

• Animal flesh (meat, fowl, fish, seafood).
• Ingredients derived from meat or bone-products (in soups, sauces or other preparations)
• Animal fats (except milk fat), frying fat or margarine containing fish-oil or similar products in cakes, pies, pasta, for frying or baking, for greasing baking-traws, tins, or any other manipulation.
• Gelatine, aspic, gelling agents of animal origin.
• Royal Jelly.
• Other products containing ingredients originating from slaughterhouse by-products.
• Battery eggs.

Specific ingredients:

• Cheese - Is usually manufactured with traditional rennet made with enzymes from calves’ stomaches and is therefore not acceptable, whereas vegetarian cheeses manufactured with enzymes of vegetable origin or micro-organisms are acceptable.
• Fats & Oils - need to be of vegetable origin. Margarine needs to be checked. It may contain ingredients which may be derived from animal fat, vitamins A and E which may be stabilised with gelatine, or vitamin D, which may come from lanolin of slaughtered sheep – these ingredients are not acceptable.
• Honey - Is acceptable. But not acceptable for vegan products.
• Fruit Juices, Alcoholic beverages, vinegar - Need to be chequed. They may have been clarified with gelatine, egg-white (usually battery), isinglass (swim-bladders of sturgeon fish) or chitin (crushed lobster or crab shells) – not acceptable.
• Whey - Should only be used if derived from a vegetarian cheese making process which included microbial or plantbased rennet.
• Worcestershire Sauce Often contains anchovies, needs to be checked.

Additives

Need to be checked with regard to their possible animal origin.

And products with genetically modified ingredients are prohibited, too.