On April 2, 2019, ANVISA disclosed on its website the report of contributions submitted under the Public Subsidy Taking (TPS) No. 1/2018 regarding the revision of nutritional labeling of foods.
This TPS was used to collect data and information about the Preliminary Report of Regulatory Impact Analysis on the same topic, approved in May 2018. In this process, there were over 33,000 contributions and the information obtained was consolidated to compose a Public Consultation, which will bring a regulation proposal.
One of the main problems identified through TPS No. 1/2018 was that the current nutritional labeling does not allow easy identification of the food’s nutritional value by the consumer and even information about allergens present in its composition.
With this in mind, regulatory options are being discussed such as the inclusion of front-of-pack nutritional labeling for foods that contain high levels of sugar, saturated fats, and sodium, changing the standardized declaration base to 100 g or 100 ml, changing nutritional claims and the list of nutrients that must be mandatory information on nutritional labeling.
Like any regulatory measure, the changes made must be adequate to ensure the consumer’s information about essential product issues, but also cannot subject suppliers to excessive burdens.
The current challenge lies in the need for these measures to be compatible, on the one hand, with an environmental scenario that requires an increasingly greater concern with product packaging and its limitation to the minimum necessary and, on the other hand, the unlimited informational potential of digital tools and the internet. The question that must be asked is: to what extent does including more text on packaging actually inform? And what measures can be used, beyond inserting more information on the packaging, to increase the consumer’s awareness of what they are consuming.
Not everything that is textually informed is assimilated by the lay public, subverting the duty of information itself. An excess of information can lead to an inverse situation to what is sought to promote: the consumer’s disinterest or confusion.
In addition, another important issue involved in this debate is how far the state can go to “inform” the consumer. Can the state recommend a behavior to the consumer, suggesting that it avoid certain types of food? Or should it limit itself to informing the presence of some components that may be harmful to health on the product label, so that the consumer can make their own interpretation and evaluate whether they will consume the product or not?
With the completion of this stage of consolidation of contributions received in TPS No. 1/2018, the schedule and strategies for conducting the next steps of the nutritional labeling regulatory process will soon be defined.