Set to become a legal requirement later this year, the aim of the legislation is to provide consistency within food and drink labelling, allowing consumers to undertake comparisons of products by how healthy they are.
While many manufacturers and retailers already provide nutritional guidance on their products, the new legislation will require this information to be displayed in a unified format on pack fronts across the vast majority of food and drink categories.
The exact look of the final front-of-pack label is still being finalised, but it’s likely to be a lozenge format representing fat, saturated fat, salt, sugar and calorie content at-a-glance via a mixture of % GDAs, colour coding and low/medium/high ratings.
Providing standardised food labelling may set out to help consumers make informed choices, but there is a danger that the information could be misinterpreted. For example, whole milk is likely to be rated as ‘amber’ due to its fat content of 3.5%, whereas diet carbonated soft drinks would carry green lights as they contain low sugar and fat. Yet, with the multiple health benefits associated with calcium-rich products such as milk, does this information accurately reflect the nutritional credentials of these products to consumers?
A recent piece of research that we conducted may provide some relief for manufacturers whose relatively healthy products, arguably unfairly, fall foul of the new guidelines.
We found that, in general, consumers place more importance on the benefits a product can offer (such as contributing towards their five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and containing natural ingredients) rather than how the product has reduced amounts of negatively perceived elements such as fat, calories or sugar.
For manufacturers, this presents an opportunity to strongly promote their products’ positive aspects through package design and marketing campaigns, essentially counteracting any anticipated downsides resulting from the new system.
An excellent example of this approach in practice is Innocent Drinks. The company grew its juice and smoothie sales by 42% in 2012 and is set to expand further, despite the products’ notoriously high sugar content.
Innocent Drinks has often had to defend itself from media criticism over the sugar levels of its drinks, forcing it to develop a clear and consistent positive message for consumers. The company strongly communicates, through packaging and marketing, that each bottle of its drinks provides at least ‘one of your five a day’, as well as being full of fibre and great-tasting.
These multiple benefits appeal to consumers to such an extent that they seemingly eclipse the poor press and negative aspects of the product. Instead, they drive sales.
Ultimately, allowing consumers to make an informed choice is a good thing, as it gives consumers control of their dietary intake. The one-size-fits-all approach of the new guidelines means that manufacturers will need to be entirely clear about the benefits their products offer, minimising any downsides and then ensuring that their on-shelf packaging communicates that positioning effectively.
Dan Hibbs is associate director at food and drink research partner MMR Research Worldwide.
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