Our thinking

Know the (nutri) score

1 November, 2024

If you’ve been grocery shopping in the UK, you’ll have seen a graphic on the front of your food indicating fat, sugar, salt and calorie content using red, amber, and green colours (the so-called “traffic light” system). These labels are designed to show how products stack up against each other health wise, allowing shoppers to make more informed choices about their diet. They are also –surprisingly – entirely voluntary.  

But not if the CEO of Nomad Foods has anything to do with it. Earlier this week, Stéfan Descheemaeker, who heads up the frozen foods business, called upon the UK government to make it a requirement for all packaged foodstuffs to carry traffic light labels. He further suggested that food companies should be made to publish annual figures revealing what proportion of their sales are made of up of “healthy” and “unhealthy” products.  

It may feel like a surprising time for companies – who are increasingly swamped by regulatory ESG reporting requirements like the EU’s CSRD – to be calling for more regulation. However, it’s as yet unclear what effect companies’ disclosure of sustainability performance via the ESRS – in what will be lengthy, data-driven, and not particularly consumer-friendly reports – will have on companies’ reputations with investors and the public, and on their actual performance across different sustainability dimensions. Mr. Descheemaeker’s comments show that many companies want to put information about their performance – and specifically, the health of their products – in front of consumers right now.  

Descheemaeker hopes that regulating the disclosure of product health performance could start a “nutrition arms race” amongst food producers, pitting companies against each other to drive the creation of healthier products. We say: bring on the big guns. 

By Louise Podmore