Health and nutritional labelling of foods can be a vexed topic, often pitting health advocates against the views of food manufacturers, packaging companies and retailers. Roland Tellzen examines the latest stoush over proposals for the self-regulation of health claims on labels by the grocery industry.
While the proposed ‘traffic light’ system for food labelling dominated discussion on food labelling in Australia earlier this year and late last year, it has been a seemingly innocuous recommendation of the draft standard released in February that has come back to re-ignite controversy.
When the draft standard was published earlier this year, one of the lower-key proposals was that all health claims on food labels would need to be pre-approved and substantiated before they were allowed on the market.
The proposal attracted little media and public comment at the time. After all, it and similar proposals had been under consideration for the best part of a decade now.
At its most basic translation, it would have meant that claims on food packages – such as “supports your natural immune system” on a ‘health’ juice bottle – would have had to be checked and given the thumbs up by Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) before packaging was allowed on shelf.
It seemed non-controversial, and until July it was thought to be just a formality that the country’s state and federal health ministers would rubber stamp the proposal by the end of July.
That is, until representatives of the grocery industry weighed in with a last-minute objection to the suggestion.
The Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) set the cat among the pigeons by suggesting the proposal was “extremely inadequate and unworkable” and calling for further consultations.
Going even further, it proposed that manufacturers should be allowed to market any product without prior approval based on their own research.
If challenged, the AFGC’s proposal argued, they would only then be required to provide a dossier of research for FSANZ to verify.
The acting chief executive of the AFGC, Dr Geoffrey Annison, said such a system would operate in much the same way as manufacturers were already used to complying with.
The AFGC’s submission said the proposed system from February meant many existing labels would be “rendered illegal” under such changes, citing examples such as using Burgen’s Soy and Linseed Bread, marketed as suitable for “women’s wellbeing”, as well as a protein-flavoured milk promoted as “protein for growing muscles”.
It then stumped up figures against the notion of pre-approval. If required, the AFGC said, the packaging on some 30,000 products already on supermarket shelves would require change costing “hundreds of millions of dollars”. It estimated the cost of even changing just one label would be up to $15,300.
The reaction was as fast as it was predictable. In front page newspaper coverage following the suggestion, health and consumer advocates labelled the new proposal as industry self-regulation, and akin to the “fox guarding the hen house”.
“Industry lobby groups are fiercely resisting the proposal to subject their plans to slap health claims on chocolate and sugar to scrutiny by food regulators,” head of campaigns for consumer group Choice, Matt Levey, said.
“But we know there are ministers willing to protect consumers from overzealous health marketing and we are hopeful of a sensible outcome after decades of consultation on this issue.”
A compromise suggestion, allowing manufacturers to go to market with a claim, which independent experts in the food standards authority would then have six months to verify, also did little to mollify opponents.
The chief executive of the Public Health Association of Australia, Michael Moore, described such compromise efforts as working towards the “least worst solution that still protects health”.
“Health claims are really about sales. Whatever the compromise suggested by public servants, we urge ministers to make health the number one priority,” Moore said.
Soon after, the AFGC seemed to adopt a more conciliatory tone, edging back towards consultation and cooperation with health advocates and consumer bodies.
“As we go through the consultation process... we want to ensure that the many claims on food packages currently in the market which are factual and scientifically based and are trusted by consumers are allowed under the future labelling regime,” Dr Annison was quoted on the AFGC website.
“Industry looks forward to working with government, the public health sector, and consumer representatives to develop a regulatory framework which allows industry to continue to differentiate products based on well established nutritional science while at the same time encouraging innovation in food and nutrition to bring new products to market to help our industry remain competitive, and to assist healthy consumer lifestyles.
“At the same time, industry recognises the importance for consumers to have continuing trust in the truthfulness of label statements, as they do today.
“We can achieve this by building on the sophisticated processes companies currently have for ensuring claims they make on labels are factual, making them as robust as possible, with high degrees of accountability and transparency.
“Any standard that is adopted should be for the consumer’s benefit.”
It appears, however, that consumer benefit was not considered too urgent: the final outcome to the dispute at time of writing is still to be negotiated and settled.
