Sue
Davies, Chief Policy Adviser for Which?, looks at the welcome turnaround in UK supermarket
attitudes to food labelling.
Tesco recently announced that it will be using traffic light
labelling on the front of its food labels to show the levels of fat, saturated
fat, sugar and salt.
It is hard to explain the significance of this announcement. Its
impact immediately became clear when Aldi and Lidl quickly followed, announcing
that they too have become traffic light converts.
Which? has campaigned for traffic lights on front of pack for
several years. The UK has the worst rate of obesity in Europe.
Nutrition
information has been on the back of pack on most products for years, but our
research testing different approaches showed that putting it on the front, with
traffic light colour coding, makes it easier to tell at a glance what you are
eating.
Several retailers committed early on to the scheme: Sainsbury's,
Marks & Spencer, the Cooperative, Waitrose and Asda. Tesco even said it
would use them at one point and then changed to a percentage guideline daily
amount (GDA) label instead.
This decision had a huge influence on the main food
manufacturers who, with the notable exception of McCain, proceeded to fight off
any attempt to legislate for traffic lights.
But suddenly everything is different. There's only two
supermarkets left: Morrison’s and Iceland.
It's hard to see how food manufacturers can continue to hide the
content of their foods behind %GDAs now that supermarkets are so widely
embracing traffic lights on their own-label products that sit next to them.
It will be fascinating to see which one is the first to crumble
and finally do the right thing for consumers.
thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete