Supermarkets in labels war

If you care about what kind of food you buy, there is suddenly a lot more to digest.

The big supermarkets have put new labelling systems with more nutritional information on the front of packs – but what you get depends on where you shop. More consumer confusion ahead…

Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose have all opted for a traffic-light label, where green is good, orange is not so good for you, and red is a warning not to consume too much. This is the system the Food Standards Agency would like the whole industry to adopt.

But Tesco and many of the big food manufacturers have gone for the rival Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) system, where the label tells you what percentage of your guideline daily amounts of sugar, salt, fat and calories each serving contains.

I have been working on a number of packaging projects recently, and I always advise my clients to go for the GDA labelling system rather than the preferred traffic light system. Why? Because I am a consumer and here I am simply using my common sense!

While the colour-coding is easy enough to understand, the grams are meaningless. Taking a look at the above pictures, the Sainsbury’s packaging indicates that this product contains 15g of sugar – fair enough but so what?

While consumers may be aware of calories intake or salt content, they may not necessarily understand some of the percentages on the pack. This labelling system is supposed to help consumers, not confuse them!

Taking a look at the GDA labelling system, the above label shows that each pack contains 8.1g of sugar which equals to 14% of your guideline daily amount. Now that makes sense.

Who wins? You decide!