Food labelling in Europe

Food labelling

Food labelling in Europe never satisfies anyone - from the manufacturer to the consumer. Trying to please everyone does seems an impossibility at times. At the moment, when obesity is a worldwide problem, there are calls throughout Europe for nutritional information to be displayed on food packaging.

Poor nutrition has a direct impact on overall health and life expectancy. Growing rates of obesity and overweight across Europe increase the risk of serious diet-related chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer. Food labels, if well designed and informative could be an important and effective mechanism to improve people's diets and overall health.

Every year, hundreds of new foodstuffs are put onto the market and there is growing public interest in health issues generally and, more specifically, in diet and nutrition questions. Consumers need to be confident that what they are buying is safe; they need to know what is in the product and also information about the origin, characteristics, quality and nutritional properties of the food item. Labels must be legible, accurate, informative and easy to understand for consumers. For people living with certain health conditions or allergies, food labels are critical to help them meet their dietary constraints.

In the past, each European country had its own rules that governed what manufacturers were allowed to put on labels. With the introduction of the internal market, in which products manufactured in one country could be sold in any other member state, there was an immediate need for legislation to protect consumers and to eliminate obstacles to trading.

EU legislation on food labelling therefore has three main aims :

• To inform and protect citizens.

• To enhance the free movement of food products.

• To enable consumers to make informed choices.

Food labelling in Europe - traffic lights

A UK study of consumer preferences last year found that the shoppers would prefer a scheme that combined three elements: traffic lights, guidance daily amounts (GDAs) of certain nutrients (formatted as a percentage of daily requirements), and wording to indicate 'high', 'medium' and 'low' content.

Despite the traffic lights scheme gaining consumer preference, the EU have voted against traffic light labels on food designed to help consumers eat more healthily.

The red, amber and green labels warning about high levels of salt, fat, sugar and calories on food are used by some supermarkets and food companies in Britain, but only on a voluntary basis. All mandatory labelling rules are set by Brussels. 

The European Parliament have voted for an alternative system of "Guideline Daily Amounts" (GDAs), in the wake of intense food industry lobbying. These labels give shoppers information about how much salt, fat, sugar and calories each product contains as a proportion of the recommended daily amount, but does not use any colour coding.

MEPs have faced lobbying by sectors of the food industry which claim the system is so simplistic that products could be shunned on the basis of one "red" reading for one ingredient which overshadows more positive health ratings for other contents.

Britain's Food and Drink Federation suggested the traffic light system would create unnecessary red tape for everyone from supermarkets "to the person who sells jars of jam at a local farmers' market" and has frequently said the GDA label was better.

The European Parliament did back a proposed requirement for companies to label the energy, sugar, salt and fat content of their foodstuffs on the front of packages, as well as adding protein, unsaturated fats and fibre to this list.

The rules which were voted for will mean that labels will also have to show the place of provenance of all forms of meat; not just beef or fish as at present.

Once the new rules are agreed, food producers will have three years to update their labels, and small firms with fewer than 100 employees will have five years to do so.

Italian displeasure at food labelling in Europe

Italy has complained to the European Union over the impact of stricter food labelling on confectionery products, which some Italians fear could lead to the death of the world-famous Nutella chocolate spread.

The European Parliament voted for a draft proposal which toughens mandatory nutritional information on food labels.

Italian media said products like the Nutella hazelnut spread could "disappear" from Italian culinary culture under the proposed rules, which limit advertising of foodstuffs that exceed specific amounts of salt, sugar and fat.

"The Battle for Nutella Goes to Europe," headlined La Stampa, one of many newspapers which raised the spectre of losing the spread that is embedded in the Italian psyche from childhood. In fact, one of Nutella's most well-known advertising slogans is "What kind of world would it be without Nutella".

In a statement, Ferrero Vice President Paolo Fulci said EU rules should not be allowed "to affect the most intimate aspects of private life."

The proposal has to be approved by all EU governments and is unlikely to be finalised before 2012.

According to the draft rules, food companies would have to label the energy, sugar, salt and fat content of their foodstuffs on the front of packages, with protein, unsaturated fats and fibre added to the list.

EgoFit on food labelling in Europe

A German health consultancy is proposing a simple new scale for displaying nutritional information on foods which it says performs well on consumer understanding in comparison with GDAs.

Although there are a range of schemes in use and proposed for displaying nutritional information on packs, much of the debate so far has been around the Guidance Daily Amount (GDA) system developed by the food industry, and the colour-coded traffic light system on food labelling.

German health consulting group EgoFit is publicising the results of a 1000-participant study which compared understanding of its sCALe system to GDAs.

The sCALe system is based on one parameter only: the amount of energy contained in a food product. It is presented as a scale, with 1cm representing 100 kcals. The proportion of calories from different nutrients are then blocked out on the scale in colour: red for protein, yellow for fat, green for carbohydrate, and blue for alcohol (envisaged at a later stage).

GDAs, on the other hand, graphically give a product's energy (calories), fat, saturated fat and sugar content as a percentage of recommended limits.

A study conducted by Dr. Henry Schulz of Chemnitz University pitted sCALe against GDA on conciseness, information content, comprehensibility and favourite model. It concluded that sCALe was better accepted by all age groups than GDAs.

Jodie Humphries

Jodie Humphries graduated from Bath Spa University with a BA Hons in Creative Writing in 2008. She has worked for GDS Publishing for the digital group since July 2009. She has previous experience with writing for the web, running her own website since April 2007.

Related News:

Do you understand food labelling? |Food waste in the food chain |Should packaging be labelled for GM ingredients? |Genetically modified food around the world

Like this article? Get the RSS feed: