The Challenge
For organisations operating across multiple international markets, navigating the intricate web of product labelling and regulatory requirements can be a formidable task. Each country may impose its own rules concerning label content, language, format and even font size. For example, the European Union mandates a minimum font size of 1.2 mm for certain mandatory food information, while the US Food and Drug Administration specifies different requirements for various label elements. These variations require meticulous adjustments to packaging for each market, making the process both time-consuming and costly.
Beyond formatting, organisations must ensure that labels accurately reflect the latest regulatory requirements, which can change frequently. Failure to comply may result in product recalls, legal penalties, disrupted market access and damage to brand reputation.
The sheer volume of products, ingredients and supporting documentation across a global portfolio further amplifies this complexity, making manual tracking, comparison and updating increasingly impractical.
Although particularly relevant to the food industry, this challenge extends to many other highly regulated sectors. Organisations working with chemicals, paints, coatings, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, agricultural products and other manufactured goods must also manage complex requirements relating to ingredients, formulations, safety information, handling instructions, product claims, packaging and labelling.
The Solution
To address these challenges, we combined AI, intelligent automation and enterprise data integration to create a connected solution that strengthens compliance, improves access to critical information, and streamlines regulatory and labelling processes.
- Regulation Comparison Tool: This tool allows users to upload and compare regulatory documents from different countries, even when they are written in different languages. An integrated translation feature standardises the content into English, facilitating easier cross-border comparisons and helping to ensure that important regulatory nuances are considered.
- Impact Analysis System: Building on the comparison tool, this system maps regulatory changes directly to affected products, ingredients and materials within an organisation’s database. This enables teams to identify potential compliance risks quickly and determine which product formulations, labels or processes may require adjustment.
- SharePoint Q&A Interface: By integrating a natural-language interface with SharePoint, users can query product data using everyday language. This simplifies information retrieval and allows teams to access critical information relating to products, ingredients, materials, suppliers and pricing without requiring specialised knowledge of database structures.
- OCR-Based Label Validation Tool: This tool extracts text from product-label images and compares it against approved or expected values. It helps identify discrepancies, omissions and labelling errors, providing an additional level of assurance that final packaging meets relevant regulatory and organisational requirements before the product reaches the market.
The Results
The implementation of these tools significantly enhances an organisation’s ability to manage and comply with diverse international labelling and regulatory requirements.
By automating complex processes and providing intuitive interfaces, the solution reduces the time and resources required for compliance-related tasks. Teams can respond more quickly to regulatory changes, maintain accurate and compliant labels across multiple markets, and minimise the risk of costly errors, penalties or product recalls.
The solution also strengthens collaboration between regulatory, product, quality, legal, procurement and supply-chain teams by making important information easier to find, compare and act upon.
While originally developed to address food labelling and regulatory compliance, the solution can be adapted for a wide range of industries in which product composition, safety, packaging and labelling are tightly regulated. This includes chemicals, paints and coatings, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, agriculture and industrial manufacturing.
Ultimately, the solution provides organisations with a more intelligent and scalable approach to regulatory compliance—supporting improved governance, greater operational efficiency and the consistent delivery of safe, high-quality products across global markets.