By Gul Basak Kiroglu, Regulatory Trends Product Manager
After the Italian prime minister was elected in 2022, one of her first public speeches promised to abolish Nutri-Score in Italy. In the past few years, it seems that everything about food, from its packaging to additives, has a political element. Front-of-pack information is no exception.
Nutri-Score is a nutritional front-of-pack rating system based on five colors launched in 2017 by the French government.
The calculation process for Nutri-Score is built on a concept developed by the UK Food Standards Agency known as “model WXYfm.” The model, developed in 2005 by Professor Mike Rayner, is a calculation algorithm based on the nutritional contents of the food.
Following Nutri-Score’s launch, several countries decided to recommend the label: Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. However, it is not a surprising that some European Union (EU) member states with traditional gastronomic products such as cheese, cold cuts/processed meats or olive oils like Italy and Poland took negative views of the labeling. Nutri-Score has also negatively impacted fruit juice by classifying it in the same category as sodas within sugar-sweetened beverages. Many manufacturers have started to advocate for an evolution of the Nutri-Score to better reflect the benefits of fruit juices, by integrating more nuanced criteria.
In fact, the “battery-based” nutritional labeling system NutrInform (or NutrInform Battery) has been proposed in Italy as an alternative to the “traffic light” system Nutri-Score.
The NutrInform Battery was proposed to evaluate not individual foods, but rather their incidence within the diet. For this reason, it is a system that provides, in a single diagram, the amount of energy, saturated fats, sugars and salt for a portion of food and their relative percentage in relation to the average reference intakes (AR) recommended for an adult.
While the World Health Organization has determined that a clearly understandable food choice logo is an important tool in the fight for health and that Nutri-Score meets all requirements, that conclusion is contradicted by multiple nutrition specialists in Poland. Other experts note that the system contradicts current EU policy focused on healthy diets based on traditional, basic products coming from local crops or farming.
In France, a new and more restricted version of the Nutri-Score nutritional label, criticized last week by the Minister of Agriculture, will come into force with the signing by the relevant ministries of the decree organizing its implementation, the government announced on March 14 this year.
In the meantime, after years of trying to roll out a mandatory Nutri-Score system across all 27 EU member states, the Commission proposal was expected in 2023. However, it was mentioned neither in the Commission work program for 2024 nor in the tentative agenda for forthcoming Commission meetings. It remains uncertain when this proposal will be tabled.
Other countries where similar approaches are adopted:
- Australia/New Zealand – Health Star Rating
- Singapore – Nutri-Grade
- United Arab Emirates – Nutri-Mark
