What’s New in Genesis Foods: Supporting Real-World Menu Labeling and R&D

The latest Genesis Foods release adds meaningful capabilities for food and beverage brands that live at the intersection of product development, nutrition analysis, and regulatory work. At the heart of this release is the Food Comparison Report, a feature that started as a way to build menu labels and grew into a powerful analysis tool for R&D and nutrition teams.

The Compliance Baseline: Menu Labeling

FDA’s menu labeling rule has been fully in effect since 2018. It applies to “restaurants and similar retail food establishments” that are part of a chain with 20 or more locations, doing business under the same name and offering for sale substantially the same menu items.

Covered establishments must meet several required standards:

• Menus and menu boards must list calories for standard menu items, including foods on display and self-service items in places like salad bars, bakery cases, or hot bars.

• Calorie information must be clearly associated with each item and placed close to the name or price so guests can see it when they order.

• Additional written nutrition information has to be available on request for each standard menu item, including total calories, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrates, sugars, fiber, and protein.

• Menus and boards must also display a statement about daily calorie intake (for example, that 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice, but calorie needs vary) and a statement indicating that more detailed nutrition information is available upon request.

That sounds straightforward on paper. In practice, it means chains need a consistent way to generate label-rounded values, capture the information FDA requires, handle frequent updates to recipes and menus, and keep hundreds of locations aligned across board menus, online ordering, kiosks, and printed materials.

This is exactly the kind of work the Food Comparison Report is built to support. The Food Comparison Report in Genesis Foods gives teams a single view of multiple food items at once. Instead of opening recipes one by one or building ad-hoc spreadsheets, users can pull sets of items into a shared report that mirrors how the menu is organized.

Applications for R&D with Recipe Versioning

Because the Food Comparison Report works directly from your ingredients and recipes in Genesis Foods, it stays in sync as products are updated. And because reports are global within an account (subject to access controls), nutrition, regulatory, R&D, and marketing can all work from the same source of truth instead of maintaining parallel versions.

In our team's product research, we found that the Food Comparison Report could be used for more than simply presenting final numbers; it can be used to support that earlier, exploratory work that shapes product decisions.

For example, when a development team wants to see how a sandwich performs with different breads, sauces, or portion sizes, they can:

• Pull multiple versions of the same recipe into a single report

• Include label-rounded calories and key nutrients under the correct authority

• Compare the impact of changes on calories, sodium, saturated fat, and other nutrients that might affect claims or brand standards

Because Genesis Foods tracks versions, teams can include previous versions of a recipe alongside the current one. That makes it easier to answer questions like: “How did this product look nutritionally before the cost-reduction project?” or “Are we still within our targeted calorie range after that ingredient swap?”

All of this can happen before anything goes into a menu engineering meeting or consumer testing. The same features that help satisfy FDA menu labeling rules also give R&D and nutrition teams a better way to weigh tradeoffs.

Supporting Multiple Authorities and Bilingual Menus

Many brands operate across borders or in markets where bilingual information is the norm. The Food Comparison
Report supports label-rounded values for all supported authorities in Genesis Foods, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, the EU, and Australia/New Zealand. That means your team can evaluate the same product under different regulatory frameworks without rebuilding the report each time.

The report also works hand-in-hand with the new sub-ingredient alias capabilities in this release.

Aliases, now available at the sub-ingredient level, make it easier to build accurate, multilingual ingredient statements. Aliases and descriptors (such as alternate names in other languages) can be defined at the sub-ingredient level and then selected easily when building ingredient statements in recipes, which reduces manual editing and helps keep statements aligned across markets and products. That’s especially useful for:

• Chains that need English–Spanish or English–French ingredient statements on menus, packaging, or digital experiences

• Manufacturers producing private-label items for different retailers, each with their own naming preferences or language requirements

• Brands selling into both U.S. and Canadian markets, where bilingual requirements and standard menu item expectations overlap

Stay Informed

To learn more about these new features, explore our Release Notes or contact us at release@trustwell.com for further details. Stay connected with us on social media for the latest insights from industry leaders.