As consumers, we’re increasingly aware of the impact our diet can have on our health. Yet, navigating healthy food choices is a constant struggle to understand the often misleading and confusing information presented on products. Despite efforts from the European Union (EU), current regulations are riddled with loopholes and exemptions that don’t protect the very people they are supposed to-leading to profit over health.
Dr Nikhil Gokani, Assistant Professor of Public Health Law at the University of Essex, discusses the need for stronger, more consumer-friendly labelling policies to support consumers in making informed choices about what they eat.
In recent years, the EU has taken steps toward helping people make healthier food choices, exploring policies such as ‘front-of-pack’ food labelling schemes.
A standout effort is Nutri-Score – designed to guide consumers towards healthier food choices. This colourful system uses a five-grade colour and letter scale, ranging from A (dark green, the healthiest) to E (dark orange, the least healthy). Introduced in France in 2017, Nutri-Score quickly gained traction across the continent and, today, it’s easy to spot the green-to-orange scale that gives shoppers an instant health insight into their choices.
Despite its popularity, Nutri-Score sparked some controversy, with a few countries viewing it as a threat to their cultural food traditions. Despite a mix of opposition and support, its strong evidence base means it’s now used in six EU countries. Due to its popularity and rigorous testing, the European Commission also saw it as a promising example for front-of-pack labelling.
The Commission’s Farm to Fork strategy had a high ambition aiming to “empower consumers to make informed, healthy…food choices”. During this strategy, the EU quickly realised that to truly benefit European public health, further EU-wide standardisation of food labelling was necessary.
However, food labels only provide partial insights into the health implications of products. And food labels are only one part of the bigger picture of information that pushes consumers towards or away from unhealthy food. With a few key adjustments, food labelling could evolve into an even more powerful tool, helping consumers across the EU make healthier choices. But how?
Well informed public
EU food information laws, such as the Food Information to Consumers (FIC) Regulation, aim to provide consumers with clearer, more accurate, and easily understandable details about the products they’re buying.
While the FIC Regulation mandates that information must be “clear and easy to understand,” the effectiveness of this requirement is debatable. For instance, “clear” doesn’t mean “noticeable”-mandatory nutrition declarations often appear on the back of packaging, where they are less likely to be seen.
Ensuring consumers have easy access to crucial information is a vital step in helping people make informed decisions about their food choices. Although progress has been made, further adjustments are needed to equip consumers with the tools to navigate a food environment that prioritises health over profit.
Ensuring consumers have easy access to crucial information is a vital step in helping people make informed decisions about their food choices. Although progress has been made, further adjustments are needed to equip consumers with the tools to navigate a food environment that prioritises health over profit.
Useful information for healthier living
While EU food labelling rules provide important information, they fall short in delivering transparency about what’s in our food. If we take nutrient content, it’s required to be listed per 100g or 100ml of a product. While this allows for comparison between similar products, it offers little help when trying to compare different product types with varying portion sizes. Consumers really also need nutrition information per portion, but there is no legal requirement for this. The absence of mandatory recommended portion sizes also results in consumers unknowingly increasing their caloric intake due to larger portions.
Front-of-pack labelling systems need to make it easier for consumers to assess whether a product is healthy or not. Having ingredients listed on food packaging, like a product that contains fruit, but without knowing the actual amount, leaves people in the dark. Unhealthy ingredients-such as high levels of sugar, salt, or saturated fats-do not come with clear health warnings, leaving consumers unable to fully understand the potential consequences of these products on their health. This is an advantage of Nutri-Score, which immediately signals to the consumer whether a product is more or less healthy.
Advertising giants: when big promises fall flat
Another gap in the regulation is the lack of mandatory labelling beyond packaging. Of course, we cannot talk about food labelling without talking about the giants of advertising. Food marketing is a significant player when it comes to shaping consumer perceptions and purchase decisions, yet marketeers are under no obligation to provide any nutritional or ingredient information in their ads. Instead, they bombard us, as consumers, with emotionally charged marketing messages, pushing products without stating the health facts.
Even when industries provide voluntarily nutritional information it is often misleading. Under the EU regulation on nutrition and health claims made on food, food claims must be accurate and non-misleading. However, even when accurate information is provided, it can still be misleading. Health claims such as “iron contributes to the reduction of tiredness” may be true, but they often omit that the benefit only applies when dietary intake is inadequate. Similarly, products high in sugar, such as children’s cereals, may be labelled “high in fibre” or “contains calcium,” creating a ‘health-washing’ effect that leads consumers to believe the product is healthier than it is.
Worse still, products marketed towards children and adolescents can be particularly misleading. For example, children’s cereals contain large amounts of added sugar and frequently feature cartoon characters that distract from important nutritional information. While food labels are required to be easy to understand, they often fail to clarify whether certain ingredients, such as fat, are present in healthy amounts.
The world of food labelling is complex, with many exemptions. For example, small packages aren’t required to include most mandatory information. In fact, nineteen specific products or product categories are entirely exempt from providing a nutrition declaration. Alcohol, though defined as food under EU law, remains exempt from both nutrition and ingredient labelling. This is particularly concerning given its widespread consumption and well-documented health risks, including causing seven types of cancer.
Food marketing is a significant player when it comes to shaping consumer perceptions and purchase decisions, yet marketeers are under no obligation to provide any nutritional or ingredient information in their ads. Instead, they bombard us, as consumers, with emotionally charged marketing messages, pushing products without stating the health facts.
Consumer empowerment: is this possible?
EU food information rules don’t hit the mark when informing consumers. But, if the rules on consumer food information were improved, could they empower consumers?
To support people to make healthy decisions, the food environment should encourage consumers to use health-related information. The EU knows how the marketplace helps or hinders consumers to make healthy decisions. . In the New Consumer Agenda, the Commission stated that “empowering consumers means providing a robust framework of principles and tools” and a “robust framework ensuring their safety, information, education, rights, means of redress and enforcement”.
Research shows that food choice depends on a combination of internal and external factors, such as taste, personal habits, and food environments. Simply providing information is not enough to empower consumers.
Healthier future means smarter labelling?
Even if information regulation cannot, on its own, empower consumers, it does help create empowerment. To empower consumers to make healthy food decisions, information needs to meet two conditions.
First, the information rules need to be well designed.
So, the EU needs to think more carefully about evidence-based and context-sensitive rules on whether consumer information is provided on labels, what is provided, where, when, and how. For instance, nutrition information should be provided in a way that allows consumers to understand it, such as through mandatory Nutri-Score. Even though the Commission committed to proposing harmonised front-of-pack nutrition labelling, it still misses its own 2022 deadline.
It is also essential for the EU to regulate marketing information more effectively. Food claims should be prohibited for unhealthy products. Other marketing should be banned where it increases the recognition, appeal or consumption of unhealthy food.
Second, it needs to be recognised that information is not a panacea in tackling diet related diseases.
How consumers make food decisions is multifactorial and complex. It is now really clear that improving diets needs regulators to tackle the industry practices that push us towards poor nutrition. These industry tactics maximise over-consumption of unhealthy food at the expense of healthy food. These include creating new, highly palatable products, promoting them aggressively, selling them at lower prices than healthy food, packaging them in large ready-to-eat portions and selling them in widely accessible locations.
Tackling the commercial determinants of health, such as aggressive promotion of unhealthy foods, is essential to achieving better consumer outcomes. The EU must propose stronger laws to protect consumers’ health.
Nikhil Gokani
Nikhil's work explores how law can be used to tackle non-communicable diseases by targeting particularly unhealthy diets and excessive alcohol consumption—and the associated health inequalities. Nikhil’s work brings together public health with national, EU, and international law, with a focus on consumer protection, trade, and human rights law. Nikhil's primary expertise is in the regulation of food and alcohol information, particularly front-of-pack nutrition labelling and alcohol labelling. Nikhil regularly presents at national and international conferences. He has published widely in both peer-reviewed journals and other publications. Nikhil regularly works with governments, intergovernmental organisations, and civil society nationally and internationally. He has written reports for organisations such as WHO, UNICEF and Movendi International. His research has attracted funding from prestigious organisations, including the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. He is Chair of the Alcohol Labelling and Health Warning International Expert Group at the European Alcohol Policy Alliance (Eurocare), member of the WHO Europe Technical Advisory Group on Alcohol Labelling, and Vice President of the Law and Public Health Section of the European Public Health Association (EUPHA).