Paris (AFP)
Two years after its official introduction, Nutri-Score's simplified nutritional labeling is only present on 5% of the products sold in supermarkets, considers the association UFC-Que Choisir, which demands that it be made obligatory to the European level.
"If the Nutri-Score was posted, parents would remove a lot of industrial food for children," said the UFC Tuesday in a statement.
Indeed, according to the association, "82% of consumers can not read the complex table of mandatory nutritional analysis", or "in reverse of official recommendations, too many manufacturers continue to saturate their products with sugars and fat "while the Nutri-Score allows" to understand at a glance their poor nutritional quality ".
According to the UFC, for cereals for children's breakfast, "the majority of breakfast products have a D, the same score as a butter croissant".
"With nearly one in five children affected by obesity or overweight, it is more important than ever to make all the transparency about the nutritional composition of food," says the Association, which "calls on public opinion to mobilize by signing the European citizens' initiative petition ".
The petition launched in May by several European consumer associations to ask the European Commission to make the Nutri-Score mandatory has so far gathered about 80,000 signatures.
Already in place in France since the autumn of 2017, but optionally because of the current European regulations, as well as in Belgium and Spain, this labeling system is based on five letters (A, B, C, D and E) and a color code, from green to red, depending on the nutritional quality of the food.
The food giant Nestlé said in June that it would adopt the Nutri-Score for all its products sold in Europe, over a period of two years.
© 2019 AFP