Carrefour Mandates Nutri-Score Labels for French Suppliers

Retail giant Carrefour will soon dis­play the Nutri-Score logo for most food pack­ages sold in France.

In a let­ter addressed to more than 550 food pro­duc­ers, Carrefour set a three-month dead­line for adopt­ing the front-of-pack label (FOPL).

If sup­pli­ers fail to com­ply, the retailer said it would inform its cus­tomers, cal­cu­late the Nutri-Score rat­ings for those prod­ucts and pub­lish them on its web­site and mobile appli­ca­tion.

“We will be com­mu­ni­cat­ing the Nutri-Score of var­i­ous prod­ucts sold at Carrefour on our web­site and the Carrefour mobile appli­ca­tion, except in cases where you for­mally object to this, which will be com­mu­ni­cated to our cus­tomers,” Alexandre Bompard, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of Carrefour, wrote on LinkedIn to the retailer’s sup­pli­ers.

This is the first time a retailer has taken such a firm stance with its sup­pli­ers regard­ing Nutri-Score.

Although France adopted Nutri-Score in 2017, its use on pack­ag­ing remains vol­un­tary, and pro­duc­ers are not legally required to include it. More than 7,000 food prod­ucts sold by Carrefour already fea­ture the label.

Nutri-Score is a traf­fic-light-style FOPL that uses a com­bi­na­tion of five coor­di­nated col­ors and let­ters to rate how healthy a pack­aged food item is based on its fat, sugar, salt and calo­rie con­tent per 100-gram or mil­li­liter serv­ing.

The ​‘Green A’ indi­cates the health­i­est option, and ​‘Red ‘ denotes the least healthy. All grades of olive oil are rated with a ​‘Light-green B.’

Recent research has sug­gested that Nutri-Score has influ­enced the com­po­si­tion of food prod­ucts in France, the first coun­try to adopt the label­ing sys­tem.

According to the study, food pro­duc­ers are refor­mu­lat­ing prod­ucts to achieve higher rat­ings on the front-of-pack label.

“Before we ask our­selves whether or not to tax sug­ary prod­ucts, let’s start by giv­ing our cus­tomers full infor­ma­tion about what they con­sume,” Bompard said.

He empha­sized that Nutri-Score’s expanded pres­ence in Carrefour’s offer­ings is part of the broader Act for Food ini­tia­tive.

The ini­tia­tive, launched in 2018, aims to improve the qual­ity-to-price ratio of Carrefour’s prod­ucts while increas­ing trans­parency in food pro­duc­tion. The pro­gram directly involves food sup­pli­ers in these efforts.

“Today, I want to take a step fur­ther by pro­vid­ing even more infor­ma­tion to our cus­tomers about the nutri­tional pro­file of the prod­ucts we sell to help them make choices that lead to health­ier and more sus­tain­able con­sump­tion,” Bompard wrote.

Among the sup­pli­ers tar­geted by the let­ter is Danone, the French food multi­na­tional, which recently announced plans to reduce the use of Nutri-Score on its pack­ag­ing sig­nif­i­cantly.

Danone attrib­uted this deci­sion to the recent revi­sion of Nutri-Score’s under­ly­ing algo­rithm.

“This devel­op­ment gives an erro­neous view of the nutri­tional and func­tional qual­ity of drink­able dairy and plant-based prod­ucts, not in line with food-based dietary guide­lines in Europe,” the com­pany said.

Nutri-Score has been adopted by sev­eral European coun­tries, though it remains vol­un­tary for sup­pli­ers in all cases.

The Carrefour ini­tia­tive comes as Nutri-Score’s future in Europe is increas­ingly uncer­tain.

As the new European Commission begins its term on December 1^st, the new Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare, Olivér Várhelyi, ruled out the E.U. adopt­ing Nutri-Score as a European-wide offi­cial FOPL dur­ing the upcom­ing leg­is­la­ture.

• The Canary