Star ratings for packaged food soon
The government is working on a regulation to make mandatory specifying the dietary ingredients in packaged food products on the front of their packets to help customers make an informed choice on what they are consuming.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), under the Ministry of Health, is working on a draft regulation and has identified the following key parameters crucial for healthy dietary requirements: The fat content, sugar and salt content, and number of calories in the product.
These food ingredients in a product will be benchmarked against what the healthy or permissible limits of their consumption should be. These food components, closely related to diet-related health risks, have to be printed in the front part of the pack in symbolic and simple-to-understand form.
Currently the nutritional values of the components are printed on the back of the pack, and they do not give consumers much idea about their health implications.
Various options to create benchmarks are being considered. One is a “star rating” system (just like that used in air conditioners in India to judge energy efficiency on a scale of five) to make it simple for a consumer to judge the nutrient content of the product. The other option being discussed is a “traffic lighting system”, under which the benchmarking is undertaken based on whether the amount of the ingredient is more than what is considered healthy (red signal), lower than permissible (green mark), or medium (orange signal).
The third option is to tell the consumer what percentage of the daily permissible limit of a product is available in the product. So, for instance, if the permissible limit for salt is 10 gm a day per person and the product has 5 gm of salt, the company should mention that it meets 50 per cent of his or her daily requirements.
Once the draft note is finalised, the FSSAI is planning to discuss it with the various stakeholders before it becomes a regulation. A senior official in the FSSAI said the logic of front-of-pack labelling (FOPL) is that it is a well-established global practice and different countries use different models of it.
“The whole idea is to simplify the nutritional information, through illustrations and symbols, so that the consumer understands the nutritional value of the product,” he said.