Towards meaningful consumer information on food ecological impact

Two thirds of European consumers are willing to eat more sustainably yet face hurdles. Price, lack of knowledge, the challenge of identifying sustainable food options in the shops as well as their limited availability are the main perceived barriers to sustainable eating.

With consumers increasingly concerned about the environmental impacts of their food choices, environmental labelling of food has started to develop. Yet today, this information is largely missing or, when available, it is often unclear, incomplete, and consumers are unsure whether they can trust it. Consumers are also not aware of the visions of agriculture which implicitly underpin the different types of environmental scoring systems for food.

Ahead of a European Commission proposal on sustainable food labelling due in 2024, some governments and private operators are increasingly developing ‘scoring’ systems (inspired from those used in the nutrition labelling area) to inform consumers about the impacts of their food choices, especially on the environment.

There are significant methodological challenges in measuring the environmental impacts of food products. The Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method promoted by the European Commission, in its current form, appears ill-suited to assess the environmental performance of agri-food products. Importantly, some of the methodological choices behind the development of environmental labelling implicitly favour certain visions of the food system. As such, they must be openly debated.

Moreover, BEUC recommends that any environmental labelling system for food should:

• be transparently developed and based on solid, independent scientific evidence;

• include an interpretive element (such as colour-coding) and apply across-the-board to all food products;

• nudge consumers towards more plant-based diets by allowing them to compare products both within (e.g. various types of meat) and across food categories (e.g. animal vs. plant proteins) – so long as these comparisons are relevant and useful to consumers to guide their choices;

• adequately reflect the positive externalities of organic and extensive farming systems (e.g. on biodiversity, soil health, etc.);

• be accessible and affordable to all types of producers, big and small. 

Labelling and information is not a panacea, however. It must not distract policymakers from taking bolder action to transform the food environment in a way that makes the sustainable food choice the easy one for consumers.