Front of pack food labelling: why one size will never fit all

The media hype around the Food Standards Agency's (FSA) launch of its traffic lights scheme and the high profile rejection of this by leading manufacturers and retailers has raised some interesting questions about the purpose of the whole exercise.

If the FSA has any sense, it should be thrilled that so many key players in the food industry have responded by introducing their own variants - for what this means is that the core issues are being taken seriously by those who count.

What matters at the end of the day is that consumers have a workable method for assessing whether a product is healthy or not. While there are good arguments in the short term for having a single consistent model, such an ideal fails to respect the consumer's ability, and indeed desire, to decide for herself if a product is healthy.

Traffic lights certainly don't fit with the clear trend towards personalisation and what most consumers really want is to be given the tools that enable them to make that decision for themselves, rather than a crude one-size-fits-all assessment.

We have only to look at how far food labelling has come in the past few years (eg new requirements for allergen declarations and an increasing display of salt in addition to sodium content) to know that labelling is an evolving process and traffic lights are just one step along the way.

Next steps could include much more detail on fibre or fats with, for example, monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) being displayed as well as saturated fats.

Total fat content could already be considered a redundant measure anyway given the ever increasing understanding of the fact that, as with carbohydrates, there are good and bad types.

Sainsbury for one already includes a breakdown of fats into saturated, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated on some of its own-label products.

Thus we shouldn't let ourselves get too hung up about how our particular food products rank when it comes to traffic lights, but rather should just use the whole process as an incentive to improve product formulations and to identify clearer ways to communicate with the consumer which empower them to make choices that suit their own personal circumstances.

Stephanie French​ is a nutrition strategy consultant at Harlequin Plus​