Too many signposts lead consumers on road to nowhere, warns FSA

Retailers and manufacturers won’t do shoppers any favours if they all roll out proprietary front-of-pack nutritional ‘signposting’ labels, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has warned.

Speaking at a Leatherhead Food International conference on food signposting, FSA director of consumer choice and dietary health Gill Fine said she welcomed the fact that retailers and manufacturers had done their own research into signposting. However, she hoped that they “would want to reassess the effectiveness of their schemes [in the light of the FSA’s research]”

She added: “I can fully understand why they are doing their own thing, but I am concerned that there will be a plethora of schemes on the market, and this will only serve to confuse consumers.”

The FSA will publish the results of extensive consumer research assessing the effectiveness of four different signposting schemes later this year, giving companies time to act before the government’s March 2006 deadline for the introduction of an industry-wide signposting scheme.

The schemes to be taken into the final stages of research are simple and multiple traffic light labels and two schemes based on guideline daily amounts (GDAs). After an initial pilot study, a representative sample of around 2,600 people from around the UK will be interviewed.

If companies do not migrate to the system recommended by the FSA over time, she added, “you’d have to ask what evidence do they have proving the efficacy of their own schemes [as compared to the body of evidence supporting the FSA approach].”

Her concerns were echoed by Asda, which has warned that the prospect of hundreds of different on-pack signposts by next March could make the shopping experience "a total nightmare for the consumer".

Many manufacturers attending the Leatherhead event said they were struggling to see the value of any signposting scheme. One delegate from the bakery sector said: “Traffic lights are far too simplistic. But once you include all of the information you need to really help customers make informed choices, you end up just replicating what’s on the back of the pack already, which defeats the point. I’m not sure that there really is a compromise.”