FLABEL

Food Labelling to Advance Better Education for Life

Dates

Start date: 1 March 2008
End date: 30 January 2012

Summary

Nutrition labels are potentially a major instrument for enabling consumers to make healthier food choices, but current insights into how nutrition labels are used by consumers in real-world shopping situations are limited, making the science-based formulation of new labelling policies and the evaluation of existing ones difficult. 

The objectives of this project are to determine how food nutrition labelling can affect dietary choices, consumer habits and food-related health issues by developing and applying an interpretation framework which incorporates both the label and other factors/influences. Guidelines will be developed on use of nutrition labelling for EU policy and the food industry, especially SMEs, which will include recommendations for assessing the impact of ongoing and future legislative and voluntary food labelling schemes.

Objectives

These objectives will be achieved by a work programme covering

• analysis of current penetration of and exposure to nutrition labels in the EU
• determinants of ‘attention to’ and ‘reading of’ nutrition labels
• determinants of consumer liking of nutrition labels
• understanding how consumers infer healthiness of food products from label information in combination with other sources
• in-store use of labels
• effects of label use on dietary intake.

The project will draw heavily on the involvement of stakeholders from the whole food sector to ensure results with high practical relevance.