Are you in any doubt if that sachet of coconut chips you are about to eat and open was truly registered with NAFDAC? Is the product and packaging too poor in appearance to have been approved by the National Agency for Foods & Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC)? Well, the good news is that you can easily verify this by using your mobile phone or laptop.
Many people I spoke to — prior to revealing the information to them, did not know that it was possible to verify the authenticity of NAFDAC product registration number some processors put on their food packages. NAFDAC has done a very good job in this regard, we have to commend them.
How To Verify NAFDAC Registration Number of Products
This is very simple to do. All you need is your mobile phone or any device connected to the internet. Log on to the official website of NAFDAC and search for the product or the NAFDAC registration number. I have three ways of verifying that I would want you to check out.
Use the Printed NAFDAC Number
For example, go to nafdac.gov.ng/product-registration, if you search 01-7188 registration number in the search bar, you should get FUN BITES PLANTITOS SPICY PLANTAIN CHIPS as the product name. Also listed are the applicant’s name (the company that applied for NAFDAC registration number) and the active ingredients that make up the food under check.
I was particularly interested in the plantain chips because I see many of them on Lagos roads and I do wonder if they were ever approved for production. If the package they use for them were appropriate and if they were ever approved? But since I was able to check, no issues.
Use The Product Name To Search
You can go to the registered products search portal of NAFDAC at nafdac.gov.ng/product-registration. and type in the product name deployed on the package of the food you want to look up. In the screenshot below, I used Vitamilk.
The problem with searching with name is that you can come up with results of similar products and you then have to compare all the names with the one on the package. It happens when you use NAFDAC number too but often, they are variants of same products from a manufacturer e.g. Coca Cola and Zero Coke.
I use that second method when the NAFDAC registration is not legible or has faded away.
What is really not clear is whether NAFDAC updates this database very often. If not, you might get to see a newly-registered product in the market that you won’t find information about it online. We don’t know this, but what I know is that I have been able to find every product I searched for on that platform.
We have also seen drugs and cosmetic products carrying numbers that can be sent to some special SMS shortcodes in order to verify if the products actually came from the company that was printed on it. This way, we can know products that were imitated and we hope we can see this on food products soon.
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