Manufacturers offer alternative food labelling

[Anthony Butcher]

http://www.itv.com/news/britain_65c4...5e06bc897.html

Leading British food and drink firms are launching their own nutrition labelling system, shunning the official watchdog's traffic light scheme.
The Guideline Daily Amount - or GDA - labels are part of a £4 million launch on Monday by a coalition of 21 manufacturers and three retailers.

They will go straight into competition with the Food Standards Agency scheme which wants red, amber and green to show levels of fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt in processed foods.

GDA supporters, including Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Danone, Tesco, Somerfield and Morrisons believe customers will shun products with a red label and believe their system gives the consumer more information.

Food industry GDA campaign director Jane Holdsworth said: "We have made it simple to compare what's inside thousands of everyday foods so you can choose what best suits your diet."

The Food Standards Agency's traffic lights scheme is backed by Sainsbury's, Waitrose, the Co-op, M&S and Asda and it believes customers prefer a simpler way of knowing what products are good and bad for their health.

"Some consumers do like the extra information that GDAs provide," the FSA said in a statement.

"However, without a traffic light colour code, our research showed that shoppers can't always interpret the information quickly and often find percentages difficult to understand and use."

[Anthony Butcher]

While this is a step in the right direction (i.e. more information), it is almost entirely focused on health issues, rather than what Label My Food is campaigning for. It also only covers supermarkets, and won't appear anywhere near restaurants or take-aways, so it is of no value when eating out.

[Anthony Butcher]

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/fe...cle2124837.ece

Half of adults will be unable to do the maths needed to understand the new labelling system being launched by the food industry in a £4bn advertising blitz next week, say campaigners.


In an attempt to derail the Government's traffic light warning system for processed food, 21 commercial giants have combined to publicise a rival scheme based on a product's contribution to daily allowances.


The Children's Food Campaign warned yesterday that figures from the Department for Education's skills for life survey suggested that 47 per cent of adults understood percentages so little they would be flummoxed by a scheme designed to improve their health.


Richard Watts, its co-ordinator, suspected the Food and Drink Federation project was a ruse to avoid red warning signs being slapped on junk food. "The food industry will be aware that their new labels will be useless to almost half of adults and most children, who simply lack the complex mathematical skills to interpret them," he said.


On Monday, an unprecedented alliance of food giants will launch a television, press and online advertising campaign called "Know what's going inside you".


Later this month the Food Standards Agency will counter the campaign with 10-second TV advertisements promoting its traffic light system.

Tony Blair warned the food industry last year it faced legislation unless it adopted effective labelling to indicate product healthiness. Most food retailers, including Sainsbury, Asda and Marks and Spencer, have backed the FSA system which uses colours to denote levels of sugar, fat, saturated fat and salt. A green light signifies a low level, rising to amber and then red for a high level.


The rival Guideline Daily Allowance (GDA) scheme is backed by an alliance of food manufacturers including Nestlé, Unilever, Kellogg and Tesco, the biggest food retailer.


The alliance was described yesterday by the £140bn a year food industry as its "biggest ever joint initiative". An industry spokeswoman, Jane Holdsworth, said: "We have made it simple to compare what's inside thousands of everyday foods so you can choose what best suits your diet."


The Food Standards Agency, which carried out research among 2,600 consumers before choosing the traffic light system, said: "We don't have a problem with Guideline Daily Allowances on front of pack but we want to see them accompanied by traffic light colours."


The public agency is spending only a "fraction" of the amount that the food industry has committed to its advertising blitz, prompting fears that the public may be unfairly swayed into backing the GDA scheme. Polling by Which? backed the FSA, finding that 97 per cent of people compared nutrients well using traffic lights. Sue Davies, chief food policy adviser at Which?, said: "Are retailers and manufacturers shying away from using simple, easy-to-interpret colours because they're scared to be up front about the fat, sugar and salt levels in their products?"


The FSA found that 62 per cent of people misunderstood the GDA label scheme, compared with only 21 per cent who misunderstood traffic light labels.

[Daniel Rhodes-Mumby]

Possibly a sign of needing to go back to school if percentages are classed as 'complex mathematics'.

I think both labelling systems would be good.
That way, the mathematically minded can get the information they want and deserve and others can simply glance at the colour code and make a quick decision based on that.

[Astrocat]

My intelligence has expressed to me, that it takes personal offence when confronted with something which assumes that it does not exist - for example, this traffic light labelling system.

My sense of logic had a quiet word with me too, and remarked that oversimplifying something frequently makes it meaningless.

For example, under the above traffic light scheme assumedly Hemp Oil (a very healthy product) would get a red light just the same as a block of lard..... and dates would get a red light for sugar just like Mars Bars would.

This sounds like a case of people trying to dumb down their explanation of a complex situation to the extent that even people with low levels of education, who are incapable of simple mathematics and understanding basic information, can comprehend it pretty much instantly.

As is the case with the Food Pyramids, it would seem to be a case of oversimplification leading to obfuscation of the truth of what is actually healthful to eat or not.

[Conserned Consumer]

Does anyone pay attention to these anyway? I know that Sainsbury's for one, use the 'traffic light' scheme.

[Anthony Butcher]

In one of the other threads we were talking about the possibility of a traffic light scheme for animal welfare. Obviously that could also be applied to foodmiles as well (which is the only workable scheme that I can think of).

[Astrocat]

We also concluded that it was a meaningless system, when used to show levels of animal welfare.


I stand by what i said in the other traffic lights topic :

I think that often, 'traffic lights'-style labelling is too dumbed-down to convey enough information to be helpful in many if not most cases.

I think this even applies to food miles, when it comes to a traffic-light system.

On the surface we might say "if a product comes from the country where consumers buy it, give it a green light. If it comes from the same continent, give it an amber light and give everything else a red light"

But that's clearly too simplistic.

If a man from Scotland buys pesticides from Ghana, insecticide from Spain, fungicide from Iraq and herbicide from Japan, has them all sent to him in Scotland and uses them to grow 'UK produced' vegetables...... then what level of traffic lighting ought he to get ?

If an English man who keeps a warehouse full of cows buys all of his feed-grain from the amazonian forest area and from America, then uses them to raise 'British cows' , then what traffic lighting ought to be used to denote any flesh 'produced' by him ?

If we were to say red in both of these situations, which would be logical, then very few things on supermarket shelves would ever be marked anything other than red for food miles, and it would become the sort of thing which people ignore accordingly.

And, in that scheme, what of the people who would grow things in Wick then have then trucked by road down to Dover, who would be getting amber lights even though their stuff travels further than stuff which has been sent across the channel tunnel from france ?

So, maybe we should just look at the actual distance...... rather continents.

But, then that makes no distinction between something which has been carried as a bulk-lot by road and ferry over a few hundred miles, and something which has been put on an aeroplane to transport it over a few hundred miles.... even though one method of transport obviously causes rather more pollution etc, causes more carbon emission, costs more, etc, than the other.

So, what would you suggest ?

[Alex McKee]

Should be "Produced locally" and then define locally as within so many miles. Yes, there will be very few products defined as local to begin with.

[Astrocat]

Should be "Produced locally" and then define locally as within so many miles.

But again, that says nothing at all about whether or not gallons of chemicals, fertiliser, etc.... have been flown around in order to grow that produce.

As above, that also still would make no distinction between food that has, say, been carried by public transport over 25 miles to it's sales point - and similar food which has been flown 25 miles by courier-jet over a stretch of sea to an island vendor.

As I said already, I find that defining things in such a simplistic way is not very meaningful.