EUFIC: European consumers spill the beans on food labels

Aarhus / DK. (eufic) A pan-European study by the European Food Information Council (EUFIC) that was announced at the First European Food Congress in Slovenia in November, presents food for thought, for those who provide citizens with advice and support on diet and healthy lifestyles.

The study, which questioned some 17’300 people in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, both in supermarkets and at home, found that on average only 18 percent of Europeans (ranges from 27 percent in the UK to nine percent in France) regularly look for nutrition information on food packaging in store.

Independent market research agencies carried out the field work in each country. Results showed that the better established forms of nutrition information on labels such as the Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) scheme, was widely recognised and understood by shoppers.

«While there are several nutrition labelling schemes across Europe, our findings show that people recognise them and generally know how to use them to make informed nutrition choices», commented Professor Klaus Grunert of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who conducted the study for EUFIC. «Nutrition labelling should be seen as a key element in a rounded public health strategy».

Key Findings

• European consumers have reasonable knowledge about nutrition, but they tend to exaggerate their response to foods high in fat, sugar or salt. Most consumers believe they should “try to avoid” rather than “eat less” of these foods. This finding was most prominent in the UK.
• Less than one-third of consumers look for nutrition labels when shopping in all six countries surveyed. When they looked for nutrition information, consumers looked mostly for fat, calories, sugar and salt in the nutrition table and the GDA label.
• Most consumers were able to make correct health inferences from nutrition labels with no major differences between the labelling systems (Traffic Lights (TL), Guideline Daily Amounts (GDAs), colour-coded GDAs).
• A majority of consumers in all six countries were able to use GDAs to identify the healthier product, and a large majority of consumers in the UK could identify the healthier product regardless of the labelling system on the product. Consumers paid most attention to fat and calorie levels to determine which products were healthier than others.
• Nutritional knowledge and an interest in healthy eating improve the ability of consumers to make correct health inferences from nutrition labels, thus nutrition and health education is imperative.

A webinar and accompanying documentation with full details of this study is available at eufic.org. The complete press release is there available too.

About: The European Food Information Council (EUFIC) is co-financed by the European Commission and the European food and drink industry. It is governed by a Board of Directors which is elected from member companies. Current EUFIC members are: Barilla, Cargill, Cereal Partners, Coca-Cola HBC, Coca-Cola, DSM Nutritional Products Europe Ltd., Ferrero, Groupe Danone, Kraft Foods, McCormick Foods, Mars, McDonald’s, Nestlé, Novozymes, PepsiCo, Pfizer Animal Health, Procter & Gamble, Südzucker, Unilever, and Yakult.