January 12, 2026

The Best of Genesis Foods in 2025: 6 Feature Updates That Delivered Real Impact

2025 was a big year for Genesis Foods with highly anticipated updates, brand new tools and extra-mile refinements to the industry's gold standard in food formulation and compliant labeling. Each of them help food companies streamline work, reduce risk, and improve data accuracy and supported teams across R&D, QA, regulatory, and labeling by making it easier to manage recipes, track ingredients, and prepare for new requirements.

And while we could spend hours with our noses inside a well-written set of quarterly release notes, we also understand the value of a succinct rundown of the year's biggest hits. So we're highlighting the six Genesis Foods feature updates we feel best reflect how the platform continues to evolve with customer needs and regulatory change.

The Best Features and Tools in Genesis Foods (So Far)

We want every Genesis Foods product release to improve your team's day-to-day operations and reduce friction in long-term planning, and these are the ones that made the most impact in 2025:

Front-of-Pack Labeling for Canada
Allergen Origin Identification
Find & Replace in Genesis Foods
HFSS Nutrient Profile Score Report
AskReg Allergen Suggestions
Food Comparison Report

Front-of-Pack Labeling for Canada

Canadian regulations now require front-of-package (FOP) nutrition symbols for foods that exceed defined thresholds for sodium, sugar, and saturated fat.

Determining whether a product meets these requirements and applying an accurate, compliant label can be complex and time consuming, especially if you're among the 45% of food labeling professionals that rely on manual systems and tools to get the job done.

Digital Download: State of the Food Technology Stack Survey Report

Automatically Support Canadian FOP Compliance

Genesis Foods simplifies this process by automatically identifying when a recipe meets FOP criteria and then triggering the appropriate symbol based on Health Canada guidelines.

Users can now select reference amounts directly within a recipe, helping teams align with regulatory thresholds without relying on separate tools or manual calculations. The update also includes flexible customization options: users can choose between horizontal or vertical symbol orientation, adjust the size as needed, and create English, French, or bilingual label versions. Once configured, the system provides a preview and download-ready format that can be added directly to packaging files.

Read More: How to Create a Health Canada Compliant Label

By integrating FOP tools into the labeling workflow, Genesis Foods helps brands stay compliant and reinvest time normally spent formatting, validating, and adjusting symbols manually into more meaningful work.

Allergen Origins Identification

Allergen labeling remains one of the most critical responsibilities across the food industry. Getting it right keeps food companies compliant with regulatory requirements while protecting both consumer safety and brand reputation. When teams can pinpoint an allergen's origin, they can more easily evaluate alternative ingredients or suppliers.

Genesis Foods now offers a more detailed approach to allergen tracking, giving teams greater clarity and control during recipe development and review.

Trace Allergens Back to Their Source in Genesis Foods

At the ingredient level, users can now specify subcategories for complex allergens, such as individual tree nuts, specific crustaceans or mollusks, and derivatives like sulfites and gluten. If any required allergen designations are missing from an ingredient, Genesis Foods automatically flags the issue at the recipe level.

Once they are working on the recipe level, Genesis Foods users now see two tabs in the Allergens section: Allergen Statement and Allergen Origins. The Allergen Origins tab breaks down exactly which ingredients contain or may contain each allergen, helping regulatory and QA teams trace allergen presence back to its source.

Top 9 Allergens Impacting Food Label Recalls More visibility means more thorough and confident label reviews, especially when responding to audit requests or planning reformulations. It also works in tandem with the AskReg Allergen Suggestions feature, which flags potential inconsistencies or missing data that could impact allergen statements.

Cheat Sheet: Allergen Labeling by Country

Enhancements like these improve internal review processes while reducing the risk of accidentally including overlooked allergens. The result? Quality and compliance teams can move through recipe approvals with more confidence, knowing they are supported by automated safeguards and detailed insights.

Find & Replace in Genesis Foods

When ingredient availability shifts or an allergen risk is identified, teams often need to act quickly to reformulate products. The Find and Replace tool allows users to replace one ingredient with another across the most current version of every recipe where it appears.

find-and-replace-spaghetti-genesis-foods

Swap Ingredients Across Recipes in Seconds

With side-by-side comparisons and built-in allergen flagging, users can evaluate replacement options in context before applying changes. The system highlights adjustments and maintains an audit trail, reducing human error and supporting consistency across formulations.

On-Demand Webinar: The Top 3 Challenges for Food Formulators (and How to Overcome Them)

This functionality accelerates decision-making during sourcing disruptions or product recalls with fast, controlled updates across all current versions of a recipe or sub-recipe. By automating a previously manual (not to mention tedious!) process, Genesis Foods helps teams reduce turnaround time, improve accuracy, and respond more effectively to change. Instead of editing individual recipes manually, users apply a change globally with a few clicks. Genesis Foods updates each recipe version and highlights what changed, creating a clear audit trail.

Find and Replace is just one way Genesis Foods helps teams maintain version control and labeling accuracy during periods of high change, especially R&D and regulatory users managing multiple SKUs or reformulating product lines.

HFSS Nutrient Profile Score Report

Alright. So let's start with, HFSS. I'm gonna open up a recipe here. And as you can see here, on this recipe, we can apply automated scoring tools right within the recipe, workspace. So for example, I'm running this HFSS calculation on a UK bound product. If the score is too high, R and D can test the reformulation options on the spot, see how the nutritional changes, update the score in real time, and then test a new ingredient combinations before anything even leaves the lab.

Food manufacturers selling into the UK must comply with regulations that restrict advertising for foods high in fat, salt, and sugar (HFSS). Products that exceed a defined HFSS score are subject to limitations on media placement and promotional activity.

The HFSS Nutrient Profile Score Report in Genesis Foods can identify disqualifying nutrients and produce compliant front-of-pack labeling for the UK.

Calculate HFSS Scores to Support UK Advertising Decisions

Genesis Foods includes an HFSS calculator that evaluates a product’s score based on its nutritional content. Users generate an HFSS report to support internal reviews or demonstrate compliance to partners.

This tool helps brands operating in the UK or preparing for entry into that market. It supports marketing, regulatory, and product development teams in evaluating reformulation options and protecting promotional investments.

AskReg Allergen Suggestions

AskReg, Trustwell’s AI-powered regulatory assistant, now includes expanded capabilities that help teams identify risk earlier in the formulation process. When a user edits or reviews an ingredient, AskReg scans it against a database of regulated or restricted substances and flags any that could raise compliance concerns.

Flag Restricted Ingredients with AskReg Intelligence

AskReg Allergen Suggestions in Genesis Foods This new functionality also supports allergen management: with the AskReg Allergen Suggestion feature enabled, the assistant can analyze the ingredient name and listed sub-ingredients, then suggest any potentially undeclared allergens that may need to be reviewed. This provides yet another layer of protection for label accuracy and consumer safety when working in Genesis Foods.

Hands-on Demo: Get to Know AskReg

AskReg alerts appear both on the ingredient itself and on the dashboard, so QA and regulatory teams have real-time visibility into issues that could delay production or trigger labeling changes, making AskReg your team's smart, proactive partner in simplifying the management of complex regulations.

Food Comparison Report

Comparing product versions or similar recipes often requires pulling data from multiple sources or generating full labels just to access basic nutrition and allergen details. This slows down decision-making and makes it harder to spot meaningful differences during reviews.

Read More: Smarter Menu & Product Changes Start With Side-by-Side Recipe Comparisons

The Food Comparison Report in Genesis Foods provides a fast, flexible way to analyze multiple recipes or product versions together. This tool supports deeper analysis without the need to generate full nutrition labels, making it especially useful during product development, QA reviews, and team meetings.

Review Recipe and Product Differences Using Side-by-Side Comparisons

With just a few selections, users can pull multiple recipes into a single view and customize the report to include the attributes most relevant to their goals, such as rounded nutrition values, allergens, and ingredient statements. The report uses regulatory rounding rules for consistency and clarity, and it can be configured to support English, French, or bilingual labeling.

So, yes, in Genesis Classic, we have a feature called menu label or menu label reports, which we now have available in Genesis Foods. However, we have renamed this feature to food comparison report. In our research, we realized that while menu label reports in classics are really important for building those menu boards with label rounded data for our restaurant customers, that a lot of our customers had actually started utilizing the feature for r and d purposes. So when we built food comparison report in Genesis Foods with that in mind. So I do wanna start with demoing the new feature, and there is a lot to show. It's actually quite robust. So to start to open up your food comparison reports, you navigate here to your main dashboard. And then here, you'll see a card for FCR with this option to take me there. Selecting take me there opens up your selections of reports as well as gives you the option to create a new report in this upper left hand corner. Now these reports are global to your account, which means that if you have multiple users, everyone can utilize these reports. Notice you can see Carrie's french fry comparison report and Beryl's boba tea menu board here. One thing to note, though, is that the food items within reports are still restricted by access groups. So if you do utilize access groups to restrict the view of ingredients or recipes and the report contains at least one restricted item, that user would not be able to see or open the report. But as long as you're not using any restrictions with access groups, then these reports are shareable across all users in your account. So let's start with the new report. I'm gonna go ahead and click on that button. And the first thing I really wanna draw your eye to is this toggle, at the top. Notice how it says edit report versus view report. So when you're setting up your report, adding your food items, or otherwise customizing the layout, you'll wanna do that from here on this edit screen. To see the final report with all of the calculated data and to export it, you'll do that from the view report screen. So let's start with giving this report a name. I'm gonna click on this pencil icon here and give it something easy like braille's demo report and save. Next, on the left hand side, I can build my categories. So categories are the buckets that I wanna put my food items in. So for example, Lisa, if you were building a menu board, you may want categories like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. To add a new category, I select this add category on this left hand side and give it a name. Notice how Genesis has actually automatically created a category for you called food items. If you don't wanna use this, you can either rename it or delete it. You can use the pencil icon to rename it or use the trash icon to delete. In this case, I'm gonna rename this one, and then I'm gonna add a few more categories as well, including I'm gonna add this whoopsie category because now I've decided, oops, I created an extra category. I no longer want this. I wanna get rid of it. So to do so, I simply select the category and then hit the trash icon. I've also noticed that my categories are not in the right order, so I'm actually gonna hover my mouse over the category that I want to move. And I can either use these up and down arrows or simply click to drag and drop to reorder and put my categories into the correct order. Now next, above each category is this option to, add the food items to the report. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. Now this is our new search model that we are actually rolling out first for food comparison report. And this search model is actually way more robust than our previous search models. One of my favorite things about it is that you can actually select multiple items on the left hand side, and then they will be added to your cart on the right hand side. So you can keep searching and adding things as you go. So, for example, perhaps I was searching for this report things under this specific tag, like b b. I can add that, and then I can continue on with my search as I want to go and keep adding things to my report without having to back out. You can still toggle between your user added items and trustful database items across the top here. And then we've also added an extra filter down below so that now you can search for ingredients specifically, recipes specifically, or if you wanna search across ingredients and recipes, you can now do that as well. So in this case, I'm gonna search for my grandma's red apples. Alright. One other thing we've also added to this search model is we have brought in the ability to add previous versions of a food item. We do this because we don't wanna clog up your search screen with search results, so we only, by default, display the most recent version. However, if you're looking or wanting to add a different version of the food item, you can now use these left arrows next to the name to expand it and expand and see all of the versions of these food items. As you can see, if we displayed every version of a food item by default, your search list could get really long. So that's why we only display the most recent by default, but you can expand and select others. We had another question from Stephanie. And Stephanie asked, how do I compare all versions of my recipe at the same time? So, Stephanie, this would be a really great way to do that. You could search for your recipe, select all of the versions or all of the versions that you would like to compare, and then add that to the report. And that way, you could see the changes made to that recipe over time throughout the different versions. Alright. So I'm gonna go ahead and add these and hit apply. And then now I've created my categories. I've added some food items, and now I wanna customize the data shown in my report. And this is the fun part. So to do that, I'm gonna select the column and data settings, and that's gonna open up this model. Now on this left hand side, I can select which data I want to see and what order. So, Lisa, if I was building a menu board, I'd probably want to include my nutrients, my ingredients, and my allergen statements, but perhaps I don't wanna show my quantity and measure. Notice that these column data settings have the same up and down arrows or drag and drop options as category. So if I wanted to change the layout or order of my data, I can simply just move that here on this left hand side. You may have also noticed that this panel on the right hand side is dynamically updating depending on which data that I am adding to my report. Excuse me. So in this case, I have added nutrients. And because I have selected nutrients, I now have this option to apply rounding rules. Actually, let me go one step back. So first, I wanna point out that we do have the authority selector here across the top. I wanna build this report for my United States authority, but if I did want to build it for other label authority regulations, I can do this so by clicking this. Next, I have this apply rounding rules, which is only available when I do have my nutrients selected for this report. This is a great way to get your label rounded values without having to create a label for your recipes. And before I apply these rounding rules, I wanna draw your eye to this nutrients to view list. You'll notice that when I do go ahead and apply these rounding rules, this nutrients to view list has automatically updated to using the US two thousand sixteen menu board option, when those have been applied. The reason behind this is because rounding rules only apply to specific nutrients. And to avoid a report where you have a nutrient list where some nutrients are labeled rounded and then your other nutrients are unrounded, when you apply the label rounding rules in this report, we restrict the nutrients to view list to either the mandatory label nutrients or this truncated menu board nutrients list that we have prebuilt for you to use. However, if you're looking for the unrounded nutrient data, you can toggle off the apply rounding rules and see that all of the nutrients to view list are now available, including any custom list you may have built. comparison report in Genesis foods, we now support the label rounded values for all supported authorities, including Canada, Mexico, European Union, and Australia, New Zealand. So for example, if I had switched my authority to Canada and then apply the rounding rules, notice how my nutrients to view list has updated to my Canada mandatory label nutrients list. Alright. Few more things down here. Important for menu boards is the ability to show calorie ranges per category, which you can choose to do so by toggling on the show calorie ranges button here. Also, if you like to calculate and show the percent daily value of the nutrients, you can toggle on this percent, show percent reference value here. Also, for your ingredient allergen statements, if you're using a bilingual authority like US, Canada, or EU, you can choose which language statements you'd want to show on this report. For example, for the United States, you'd be showing English Spanish. But if this is for, Canadian authorities, it would be English French. Also, with the allergen statements, you can choose to show only your contains allergen statements, your may contains allergen statements, or both. Alright. So now that I've done this, I'm actually gonna flip over to a report that I've already built for a menu board. To get back to my list of reports, I'm going to actually just use these links across here at the top, and selecting the food comparison reports brings me right back to my list of reports here. And then I'm gonna go ahead and open up this Briele's boba tea menu board report, that I prebuilt. And as you'll notice, as I opened it, it jumps me straight into my view report section. On the left hand side, I have my categories for my milk tea and my fruit teas. I have added in my food items and included my calorie ranges. But maybe while I'm looking at this, I realize, actually, I wanna add my ingredient statements to this report. I only have my allergen statements. I can simply open up my column and data settings, add in my ingredient statements, and, heck, maybe I wanna change the order of my layout too as well while I'm in there. And then hit apply. And then here I go. I have my report with my ingredient, allergen, and nutrient data as well. And then if I want to, I can export this report by using the export button in the upper right hand corner. And this report is exportable in both the CSV and the XLSX, which is the Excel file type.

Users can group items by category, such as meal type or brand line, making it easier to compare like items or build presentation-ready reports. This is particularly valuable for internal stakeholders evaluating reformulation outcomes or making decisions on product claims, allergens, or nutrition targets.

The interface supports clear visual comparison, so teams can spot differences quickly and understand their impact without toggling between separate recipe records.

Once complete, reports are easy to export and share, supporting faster collaboration and better documentation across departments. Formerly known as the Menu Label Report in Genesis Classic, this new version of a most-loved tool adds versioning, flexibility and control. Want to see how they stack up? Head over to the knowledge base: Reports Comparison: Genesis Classic vs. Genesis Foods.

See What Else is New: The Genesis Foods Upgrade Hub

Genesis Foods Supports Smarter Work Across Teams

We want every Genesis Foods update to make it possible for food companies to improve efficiency, reduce risk, and gain clarity. We know teams rely on these tools to streamline formulation, labeling, and compliance tasks while maintaining accuracy and consistency, and each feature was developed in response to user needs and regulatory requirements and support day-to-day work and align with strategic goals.

So, while 2025 was something of a banner year for Genesis Foods, we're already striving to make 2026 even more impactful. To explore these Genesis Foods feature updates in more detail and start making them work for you and your team, check out our library of hands-on demos, check out the year's release notes, or connect with a member of our team and tell us more about your goals and challenges.

Tag(s): Product Formulation , Food Labeling , Trustwell Software

Theresa Rex

Theresa Rex is Trustwell's Digital Marketing Manager. She has over two decades' experience researching, writing, creating, and marketing content for curious readers and leaders online. A former food and lifestyle writer, Theresa joined Trustwell in 2024.