The food industry has slammed the European Commission’s (EC) proposal of a 3mm minimum type size on food labels for being “short-sighted” and impractical.
Speaking at Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum’s keynote seminar ‘Food Labelling Policy - evaluating the Commission proposals and assessing future action’, Claire Hughes, senior nutritionist at Marks & Spencer, said: “We have challenged the EC on the issue of font size. The question is: what are the important messages? Because you can’t fit everything on at the moment.”
Sabine Nafziger, director of food and consumer affairs at European trade body the CIAA, said making labels more legible was clearly a critical issue, but added: “The proposal is a little bit short-sighted. If the issue was so simple, [manufacturers] would have done this already.”
Nafziger agreed that the EC’s further proposal to use contrasting colours as an aid to legibility was a good idea, but she warned against enshrining too many features of labelling in law. “We would ask the Commission to consider a more flexible tool that you could adapt quickly. We must be careful not to be overprescriptive with label designs.”
She said any labelling needed to be easy for consumers to understand and had to capture their interest. “Labelling needs to combine the identity of a product with nutritional information that is easy to find and understand.”
The European Commission published its food labelling proposals, including the suggestion of 3mm minimum font height, on January 30.