Supermarket food: reading the labels

Supermarket food: reading the labels

Are supermarkets deliberately misleading consumers with their labelling systems? Julian Rollins investigates

How healthy was your last meal? If you cooked it from fresh then you’ll have a rough idea of its nutritional value. But if it was ready-made, you can see exact figures on the packet.

The front-of-pack labels that have recently appeared on many foods are supposed to inform us about our diet. But what they really tell you depends largely upon where you shop.

If you buy from Tesco, or from a number of other stores, you’ll see a numbers-based Guideline Daily Allowance (GDA) label. Others, such as Sainsbury’s, Asda and Marks and Spencer, others use a traffic light labelling system, which features red, amber and green markings.

The result can often be confusing - some stores take one approach with their own-brand products, while the branded food on their shelves take another.

Labels war

Inside the world of food retailing there’s an ongoing war over which labels are best. In 2005, the Department of Health told food manufacturers to come up with a single UK-wide signposting scheme to make it easier for consumers to make healthier choices. The Food Standards Authority (FSA) responded with the traffic light scheme, but so far it has failed to convince some key food industry players.

For any confused shoppers, here are the basics:

Traffic lights

Traffic light food label

Developed by the FSA, traffic light labels use red, amber or green colour coding to indicate fat, sugar, saturated fat and salt levels. The Co-operative Group, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, M&S all use labels based on this colour code and were recently joined by Asda.

Pro: Can be used as an at-a-glance aid, signposting the way to healthier choices.

Con: Too simple to put over full health story for all products.

Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA)

Guideline Daily Allowance label

GDA labels give percentages of daily health guidelines for a typical portion of a product for key nutrients. They are used by some retailers, like Tesco, and food manufacturers, such as Danone, Kellogg’s and Kraft.

Pro: Gives information that can be used to plan personal daily diets.

Con: Takes time, and a grasp of maths, to understand and act upon label’s numbers.

Green rating

Despite the confusion, the good news is that front-of-pack labels seem to be improving the nation’s diet. Supporters of both approaches say that giving shoppers easy-to-find information is helping us to pick foods that nutritionists recommend we should be eating.

Sainsbury’s ‘Wheel of Health’ labelling system is in line with the FSA’s recommendations. The company claims that their customers are making healthier choices as people can identify healthier choices at a glance. Sales data also appears to reflect that customers are responding to the wheel’s simple signposting.

After introducing traffic light labelling, for example, sales of soups with a good green rating rose 126 per cent year-on-year. In the other camp, however, Tesco is equally certain that its GDA labels give customers the information they need.

Label logic

Who is right? Certainly, health professionals and consumer groups seem to prefer traffic lights. The British Medical Association has backed them and a survey by Netmums found that most respondents preferred traffic lights.

The Food Commission is another critic of the GDA approach. Spokesman Ian Tokelove says: “It was unhelpful that certain sectors of the food industry chose to take a different route from the government’s recommendation. The traffic light system isn’t perfect, but it does give consumers a quick overview that is clearly proving useful.”

But businesses using GDA show no sign of a change of heart. The Food and Drink Federation argue that GDA labels give consumers the best kind of information.

“We’re allowing people to make informed choices,” says campaign manager Jane Holdsworth. “If you have a ready meal for your dinner that contains a lot of saturated fat you know it’s not wise to have a bacon sandwich for breakfast. We are simply enabling people to make choices that are relevant to whatever else they have been eating in a day.”