Katie Campbell, Paris Office, Bord Bia – Irish Food Board
A recent food alert on Bord Bia's Consumer Lifestyle Trends Programme showed that one trend shaping consumers’ lives is “health and wellbeing”. Consumers want to eat, drink and live to optimise their body’s systems, to feel better than well today and tomorrow.
In France, this has manifested itself through the emergence of food-scoring systems such as Nutri-Score and Yuka. Yuka is a phone app whose function is to analyse the impact of food on health by decrypting labels and scoring products based on their nutritional quality (calories, saturated fat, sugar, salt, etc.). Nutri-Score is a colour-coded nutritional labelling system based on a logo with five values ranging from A to E and from green to red, depending on the nutritional value of a food product.
Despite their recent apparition on the market, these systems have already provoked much debate. The cheese and confectionary industries feel stigmatised as they are penalised due to their salt, sugar or fat content without taking into account important factors such as portion size. Similarly, health professionals have been sceptical due to the initial lack of collaboration with nutritional professionals and inconsistencies in grading. By creating separate grading systems and not working directly with health and nutrition professionals, apps like Yuka risked undermining authorities within the food industry. However, as the app has developed, Yuka has adapted their approach to include advanced data verification systems.
One of the issues is that these systems respond to complex situations with an approach and answer that is too simplistic. And yet the result is that food companies and retailers are actively reacting to them. For example, a French sandwich and pizza manufacturer is now looking to create the first "Nutri-Score A" salad. Some baby food producers are changing their recipes because of backlash from consumers following bad scores on Yuka. Système U, Auchan and Franprix have launched their own apps while Monoprix and Carrefour collaborate with Open Food Facts.
The Nutri-Score system has already been adopted across France, Spain and Belgium. Could this eventually become a European norm? A draft bill regarding Nutri-Score labelling on all advertisements in France passed the first step in the National Assembly in February 2019, but such legislation cannot be imposed on manufacturers as it does not comply with the 2011 European regulation on the provision of food information to consumers.
For more information contact katie.campbell@bordbia.ie
References:
Harel, C. (2019). La Belgique s’engage en faveur du Nutri-score. Retrieved from https://www.lsa-conso.fr/la-belgique-s-engage-en-faveur-du-nutri-score,294786
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Nutri-Score: Un outil pour des habitudes alimentaires plus saines.(2019). Gondola, 240.
Pourquoi les applis nutritionnelles font débat. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.lsa-conso.fr/pourquoi-les-applis-nutritionnelles-font-debat,296041
Puget, Y. (2019). Le Nutriscore sur tous les supports publicitaires: ce n'est pas voté... Retrieved from https://www.lsa-conso.fr/le-nutriscore-sur-tous-les-supports-publicitaires-ce-n-est-pas-vote,311601
Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 of The European Parliament and of The Council of 25 October 2011 on the provision of food information to consumers, Online]. [Accessed 15 March 2019]. Available from: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32011R1169&from=FR