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‘We hope this initiative will help Nutri-Score to rethink’: Olive oil makers launch awards in response to ‘penalising’ FOP labelling By Oliver Morrison Europe’s olive oil industry is railing against the ‘unfair’ Nutri-Score algorithm and has launched the first international awards to assess the health benefits and flavour of olive oils in the hope the food labelling scheme will review its assessment criteria.
Nutri-Score classifies food and beverages according to their nutritional profile using a scale of five colours and letters (A is green to represent the best nutritional quality while E is dark orange to show it’s the lowest).
Is Nutri-Score working in France? The results are in… Three years ago, France adopted Nutri-Score. What impact has the nutrition labelling scheme had on purchasing behaviour?
In October 2017, the French government signed a decree backing the voluntary adoption of the Nutri-Score front-of-pack (FOP) labelling scheme.
The scheme ranks food from -15 for the ‘healthiest’ product to +50 for those that are ‘less healthy’. On the basis of this score, the product receives a letter with a corresponding colour code: from dark green (A) to dark red (F).
At the time, French authorities said the scheme was the ‘most effective device’ to improve the quality of nutrition standards. It hoped the new FOP label would make the nutritional content of food an ‘element of food choice’, alongside price, branding, presentation, and taste.
Where Nutri-Score calculates the nutritional value of a product, a new front-of-pack label in France is measuring the environmental impact of food.
Consumers are increasingly aware that what we eat has an impact on both human and planetary health.
Food production is responsible for a quarter of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But there is hope: research from WWF and environmental consultancy ECO2 Initiative suggests our individual GHG contribution can be halved by changing our diets.
In France, it appears consumers are not only interested in where their food comes from, but at what time of year it ends up on their plate. A total of 38% say they consider a food’s provenance and whether it is currently in season when making purchase decisions.