American beers are getting nutrition labels
Beer!
Today in things-you-should-probably-know-but-would-prefer-not-to: American beers are going to start getting nutrition labels.
Americans are clearly concerned about their calorie intake from beer: Bud Light and Coors Light are the two most popular beers in the country. Those beers, and plenty of other American brews, will voluntarily publish nutritional information by 2020, according an announcement from the Beer Institute, a group in that represents the brewers responsible for around 80 percent of America's beer. That includes the big guns like Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors and HeinekenUSA.
The Beer Institute directive lists three goals:
To provide calorie, carbohydrate, protein, fat, and ABV (or ABW as required by state law) information on all labels in the form of a serving facts statement consistent with federal guidelines.
To disclose ingredients in products on either the label or secondary packaging via a list of ingredients, a reference to a website or a QR code. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) lists ingredients that are pre-approved in manufacturing beer.
To clearly display a freshness date or date of production on all labels or primary containers.
Beer hasn't needed a label to this point because the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), rather than the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has authority over beer, according to Gizmodo. Some, like beers without hops, which don't fall under the TTB, or beer served in restaurants, still require calorie counts, though.
Diageo, which brews Guinness, already started adding nutrition information on its products last year, according to a report by Fox News. Did you know that Guinness has only 15 more calories than Bud Light?
