Food Labelling Wars

A year ago I complained about the labels that Sainsburys are using on their food these days. They look like pie charts, but the segment sizes in no way correspond to the amounts contained in each slice.

These things have actually been in the news today as two new systems are being launched in competition with each other. The one that Sainsburys supports is the traffic light one as this is most similar to what they currently do now. I was suprised when I read this as I'd never noticed any traffic light colouring on the current pie charts.

However, looking at one now (on a pizza!) it is quite clearly colour coded red/amber/green for bad/medium/good. I feel quite stupid that I had never noticed this before, but it's possibly because on all the food I eat, all sections are normally green (ahem).

The other new system (that Tescos likes) is the GDA system which uses pastels and shows things as a % of your total recommended daily intake. I'm not sure which system I like best. It seems an odd thing for them to be arguing about when it would be easy for everyone to adopt the same standard that would have all the information. But I know that the electronics industry has had these kinds of problems for ever. It's easy to say that everyone should just use one format, but doing that in practice? Hard.

Mind you, whatever they do, I doubt I'll pay much attention. It's kind of obvious to me that some foods are healthier than others. Grapefruit good, Brie Bad.