A Little Bird Told Me… Nutri-Score Panoramas from a Flight over Europe, Connecting Science and Society

Abstract

Within the Farm to Fork Strategy, the European Commission ask for a unified Front Of Pack nutritional label for food to be used at the European level. The scientific debate identified the Nutri-Score (NS) as the most promising candidate, but within the political discussion, some Member States brought to attention several issues related to its introduction. This misalignment led to a postponement of the final decision. With the aim to shed some light on the current stances and contribute to the forthcoming debate, the objective of the present work is to understand to what extent scientific research addresses the issues raised by the general public. We applied a structural topic model to tweets from four European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) and to abstracts of scientific papers, all dealing with the NS topic. Different aspects of the NS debate are discussed in different countries, but scientific research, while addressing some of them (e.g., the comparison between NS and other labels), disregards others (e.g., relations between NS and traditional products). It is advisable, therefore, to widen the scope of NS research to properly address the concerns of European society and to provide policymakers with robust evidence to support their decisions.

A systematic assessment of the revised Nutri‐Score algorithm: Potentials for the implementation of front‐of‐package nutrition labeling across Europe

“…Proposing mandatory harmonized FOPNL across Europe would represent one of the most ambitious changes in food labeling in decades. However, the EC's proposal faced opposition from various stakeholders (Delhomme, 2021), particularly the food industry and certain agricultural sectors (such as cheese and cured meat) (Fialon et al, 2022;Stiletto et al, 2023). Additionally, some nutrition scientists and public health experts expressed concerns about the system's inadequate alignment with food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG), potentially leading to conflicting information for consumers (Konings et al, 2022).…”