Further thoughts on food labelling
Posted by kathryn in Labels & advertising
Aaah food marketers, you’ve gotta love ’em. While I get frustrated at food labelling and the misleading information on most packaging, I do often slightly and quietly admire the gall – it makes me chuckle anyway.
One of my favourite things, are those selling points that imply a particular brand is different from all its competitors, when the selling point is actually a quality inherent in all of that type of foodstuff. An example, that seems to have disappeared in the last 12 months, is those little “Cholesterol Free” stickers you used to get on avocados. It implies that these avocados are different, and special, these ones don’t contain any of that nasty cholesterol. When no avocado contains cholesterol. When cholesterol is only found in animals and fish, because you need to have a liver to make cholesterol.
The same is also true of olive oil, canola oil, rice and breakfast cereals – not a jot of cholesterol in any of them.
Seth Godin gives some more examples of this on his blog.
21 June, 2006
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I don’t normally feel compelled to raise public debate, but there is something that I feel is of quite significant importance that I discovered last week.
There was an article in the Daily Mail last week about food labelling and how some big companies are misleading shoppers by not explaining clearly and honestly what is in the food they are selling.
According to the article there are two different systems that explain the content of bad stuff in foods like sugar, salt and fat – the GDA system and a traffic light system. The Mail explained that the traffic light system is the most comprehensive way to detail the content of all foods and that it is backed by the government and the food standards agency. The GDA system is apparently unclear and Tesco use it – it puts food content details in figures rather than colours (red = bad, orange = medium, green = good).
I shop at both Tesco and Sainsbury’s and try to do a ‘balanced’ weekly shop, so that my children can get a health dinner after school. It does make me feel uneasy to think that despite our best intentions at picking-out tasty, healthy food, some companies are hiding the amount of fats and sugars in their foods and marketing them as ‘healthy options’.
The article highlighted a ploughman’s sandwich from Tesco, as an example, that had 6.2g of fat, but according to the food agenices guidlines, that figure in reality should be more like 9.3g’s.
Does anyone else feel that with the growing ‘obesity crisis in our nations children’ we all hear about, this is a problem that needs to be addressed seriously? Some supermarkets and food companies are using one system that is in keeping with government guidelines, whilst others are not. This could mean that as a family we might have to consider shopping elsewhere and this can often be extremely inconvenient.
Does anyone favour one system over another? Maybe I’m just being a bit simple, but it does seem to me that if something is labelled as a ‘red’ item then that is clear enough for me – i’ve never been very good with figures, and trying to work out the percentage of fat per one sausage and then work out how many sausages is okay, is a real pain!
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