FLABEL · Food Labelling to Advance Better Education for Life

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 incorporating both the label and other factors/influences. Based on this, 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. These objectives will be achieved by a work programme covering an 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, and 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.