Food Label War

A war seems to be breaking out between retailers, food manufacturers, and the government, over food labelling. It has had much coverage in the newspapers, and was featured on Newsnight.  The BBC has a good article on the story here, so I will sum it up briefly.

Sainsbury’s, Asda, Waitrose, Co-Op and Marks and Spencer are following the Food Standards Agency’s new guidelines for labelling food. Known as the “traffic light” system, labels are shown in green, amber, or red according to how bad they are for you.

Tesco, Somerfield, Morrison’s, and many junk-food manufacturers are instead using a system showing what percentage of guideline daily amounts (GDA) of fat, salt, calories, etc. are contained within the food.

For example, a chocolate bar might contain a lot of fat. The government want to tell consumers the food is bad, using a red symbol. Tesco, etc. want to tell you how much fat is actually in the chocolate bar, and allow you to make an educated guess as to how much rubbish you are eating.

Clearly identified nutrition information on packets of food is almost unanimously welcomed, so what’s all the fuss about? Well, Cadbury want to sell chocolate bars, so showing a bright red icon on the front of a wrapper that effectively says “eat me and you will have a heart attack” is not their idea of positive government intervention. Thus, along with Tesco and others, they have launched a system that actually informs consumers, not scared them into not buying their product.

showing a bright red icon on the front of a wrapper that effectively says “eat me and you will have a heart attack” is not their idea of positive government intervention.

For the government’s part, it seems clear that they hate the idea of educating consumers, and would rather see them scared, so have opted for a “traffic light system”.

Tesco are launching a multi-million pound advertising campaign to tell people how informative their packaging is, which will be hit with a counter-campaign from the opposing retailers soon. And for what benefit? Both systems are better than none, and neither one is perfect. Each has its benefits; simplicity is preferred by the traffic light system, whereas information is given by the GDA labels.

Has nobody thought of combining the two systems? Hundreds of column inches, millions of pounds in advertising campaigns and hours spent on TV arguing about the benefits and failures of both systems would have been much better spent making a system that everyone can agree on! In about 5 minutes I have managed to combine the systems with information given on the BBC website. I honestly do wonder why the government don’t recommend a combined system. The mind boggles!