Traffic Lights v. Guideline Daily Allowance

As has been expected, the Food Standards Agency recommended the controversial "traffic light" colour coding scheme, using red, amber and green to show high, medium and low levels of fat, sugar and salt on packaged food, at its board meeting on 9 March 2006.

Supermarkets Asda, Sainsbury's and Waitrose have either introduced the scheme or are in the process of doing so.

Major food manufacturers including Danone, Kellogg's, PepsiCo, Kraft, Unilever and Nestlé have already adopted a “Guideline Daily Amount” (GDA) front-of-pack labelling scheme.

Tesco adopted the GDA labelling approach last January and Spar has begun putting GDA information on ready meal packaging and plans to introduce the signposting on all own label packaging by the end of the year.

The FSA has argued that industry should rally behind it in supporting the traffic light scheme; but whilst simplistic concepts admittedly can have more “at a glance” appeal, the basic element of understanding what nutrients make up a balanced diet, informing the consumer and allowing comparisons of similar products are ignored by the traffic light labelling.

The test of the true voluntary nature of the labelling that the FSA has supported will come in seeing how these separate schemes are treated. Should the FSA seek to make the traffic light scheme in any way compulsory it will leave itself open to charges of irrationality for the underlying science and disproportionality in seeking to carve up the EU internal market. As it is, how any domestic scheme will be incorporated in the long term, either voluntarily or otherwise, will be reliant on the embattled proposed European Health and Nutritional Claims Regulation that earlier this month had 269 amendments tabled against it by MEPs at its second reading.