Food and drink industry powerhouses Nestle, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Mondelez International and PepsiCo are planning trials of their Evolved Nutrition Label (ENL) scheme in a number of unnamed EU member states.
ENL labels are expected to appear on shelves by the end of this year.
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The ENL group of companies are calling for a harmonised labelling approach across Europe to support healthy food choices.
They said that, despite going it alone, they are continuing to engage with EU member states and relevant stakeholders and suggested results from these tests will contribute to the EU-process of assessing nutrition labelling options, announced at the EU joint meeting on front-of-pack nutrition labelling in April.
The ENL scheme is a voluntary initiative, said to provide “simple, easy-to-understand and meaningful nutrition labelling information on foods and beverages”. The approach builds on the existing EU-wide reference intake scheme, by adding colours to the numbers that reflect the nutrient content per actual portion consumed.
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Companies involved in the ENL initiative are calling upon the European Commission to set portion sizes, To date, there are no standardised or regulated portion sizes across Europe, although information per portion is already given to consumers by food manufacturers.
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By GlobalDataThe proposed label will provide consumers with accurate information about what is in the actual portion of food they are consuming. The ENL companies have sought scientific expertise to develop a methodology to identify the average reference portion for food and drink in the EU.
The companies recently carried out a survey on the ENL label model among 3,500 consumers in seven EU member states, which they claimed found eight out of ten consumers found the label easy to understand and helpful to assess the nutrient content of food and beverages. The survey showed a clear preference for coloured labels over the monochrome reference intake label, the companies said.
Silviu Popovici, the president of PepsiCo’s operations in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, said: “Our consumers are at the heart of this process: they will benefit greatly from our move from monochrome labels to colour. At PepsiCo, we are in the process of determining where, and on what products to start using the label, but I expect the first labels to appear in markets before the end of this year.
“By launching this label with four of our industry peers, I am confident the Evolved Nutrition Label will be a valuable contribution towards a labelling scheme that works across Europe.
“We want to avoid fragmentation of the European single market – multiple label schemes would be bad news for companies like ours, but even worse for small companies.”
In March, confectionery giant Mars – one of the original members of the ENL grouping – ended its involvement in the initiative and called for an EU-wide solution to food labelling linked to nutrition and public health.
