From Brief to Label: Simplifying Product Compliance

In every quality role I’ve held across beverages, health supplements, and skincare, one challenge has always stood out during the new product development process: keeping FSANZ compliance in check while the product is still being shaped.

More often than not, that product starts out in Excel. Recipes are built with formulas, VLOOKUPs, and linked sheets that only one person on the team fully understands. One accidental change, and the whole thing falls apart.

I love custard. Just not when it’s what my spreadsheet turns into.

From a quality perspective, it’s stressful. The risk of incorrect nutrition panels, missed allergens, or formulation errors hiding behind broken cells is very real — especially when dealing with FSANZ standards, which often require checking multiple schedules just to answer a basic question.

Olif is not just a tool. It is a needed evolution.

A Real Example

A product developer says:

“I know we said fish collagen in the brief, but can we switch to bovine instead?”
“Also, let’s swap out stevia for monk fruit and include joint support benefits if we can.”

That sounds exciting creatively, but from a compliance and quality angle, it creates an entire web of follow-up work.

You now have to ask:

• Does the monk fruit meet sweetener permissions, and will it keep the sugar claims intact?

• Can we still support a joint health claim, and if so, is it covered under FSANZ Schedule 4, or will it require self-substantiation through Schedule 6?

• How will this affect the NIP, ingredient declarations, and allergen summary?

Why This Matters

Schedule 4 only permits a limited number of pre-approved high-level health claims.
If the proposed joint support claim isn’t included, the business would need to self-substantiate the claim under Schedule 6 through a systematic review — and notify FSANZ before using it on pack.

All of this usually means opening several tabs, diving into regulatory PDFs, editing formulas in fragile spreadsheets, and hoping the final version reflects everything accurately. One wrong calculation can trigger reformulation, delay production, or result in non-compliance.

How Olif Handles It

With Olif, that complexity is handled for you. You can:

• Start from the original project brief

• Make swaps like bovine for fish collagen or monk fruit for stevia

• Add new functional ingredients or benefit-driven claims

• Let the platform recalculate the NIP, check schedule permissions, flag compliance risks, and update labels

• Keep full version history automatically — with no risk of broken formulas or lost work

Olif gives technologists, developers, and quality teams the confidence to create freely.

Instead of spending hours double-checking spreadsheets, you can focus on building something great — knowing the system will guide you through regulatory and technical hurdles.

We didn’t build Olif to replace spreadsheets.
We built it to simplify the journey from brief to label, so good ideas can become great products without getting lost in compliance complexity.