Welcome to European Parliamentary Research Service podcast on nutrition labelling schemes in EU member states.

To help consumers make healthier food choices, the European Commission wants producers of food and drinks to display clear nutritional information on the front of PAC.

But this may not be so simple.

Some member states have already introduced their own labelling schemes to mark healthy products,

but will the EU win the battle at a European scale?

Stay with us. It's about your health.

With half of adults in the EU being overweight and with many health problems related to

our diet, making the healthy choice the easy choice for consumers could be one of the

solutions.

And it's in this spirit that many EU countries have introduced voluntary labelling schemes

to help consumers to identify healthier products at a glance.

Under the current EU rules, displaying nutrition information on the front of packaging is not mandatory,

but can be provided on a voluntary basis.

And labels are not only meant to help consumers, but also to encourage the food industry to

produce healthier products. Consumer organizations and health NGOs have largely supported such

schemes, but the food and drink industry warns that, one, these schemes may be oversimplified,

they can mislead consumers, and two, these different labels in different member states can be just

too confusing. This is why the European Commission in its new Farm to Fork strategy, launched in May

2020, announced that it would propose a mandatory and harmonised front-of-pack nutrition

and labelling scheme system by the end of 2022.

But before we get there, let's look at what current EU rules say.

Current EU rules oblige food and drink producers to give consumers basic information on the content of specific products, such as a list of ingredients and potential allergens and a

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