Category: Food
Lobbying Hangover: How intense alcohol industry pressure put Commission labelling plans on the rocks
All food and drinks companies in the EU must display ingredients and nutritional information on the label. All? Not exactly. The alcohol industry is exempted…for now. BEUC Senior Food Policy Officer Emma Calvert unveils how official meeting documents prove that...
The EU’s trade policy can be sustainable – and here is how
With the failure of the World Trade Organisation to address climate issues in trade, BEUC's Mykyta Sobko looks at how to tackle the pressing issues of sustainability and consumer concerns in trade policies.
How reliable is the EU Transparency Register?
Transparency is key to ensure citizens’ trust and accountability of EU institutions. To make it happen, the EU set up the Transparency Register. Yet as the European Ombudsman highlighted in a recent decision about obscure lobbying practices against the Nutri-Score...
Green Santa is coming to town – a year clamping down on greenwashing
BEUC has been involved in fighting greenwashing for many years and 2023 was the year where we stepped up our game. We expanded our effort cross-teams, looking at different areas of consumers’ lives and how we can make them free...
Sandra Lima, BEUC Consumer Rights Team, BEUC Consumer Redress and Enforcement Team, BEUC Sustainability Team and BEUC Food Team /
December 20, 2023
What’s for lunch? Helping consumers make healthy and sustainable food choices
Consumers do not have a “free choice” of what foods they want to eat. The less healthy and less sustainable option is the widely available and often more affordable one. It's time to make the healthy and sustainable choice the...
Food Label Ambush: How intense industry lobbying halted EU plans
Countless meetings, disinformation and even threats of increased immigration… how lobbyists turned the Commission’s food information plans on their head – to the detriment of consumers.
Carbon-neutral food? Too good to be true
‘Carbon neutral’, ‘CO2 neutral’, ‘carbon positive’, ‘carbon neutral certified’. These days it’s difficult to miss these powerful claims on products and services when we’re shopping. The supermarket shelves are no exception: from bananas to pork, blueberries to milk, the variety...
Agricultural agreements cannot be a smokescreen for greenwashing and profiteering
Consumers are increasingly worried about the impact of their consumption, including the food they eat. But draft guidelines for the food sector could lead to minimal sustainability improvements as a pretext to restrict competition, writes Emanuela Antolovic.
The EU has made our food safer. Time to make it more sustainable.
From a patchwork of rules creating a single market, EU food legislation has evolved over the past forty years into a body of food safety and consumer protection laws. Now is time to take it to the next level so...
Nutri-Score now: the time to tackle the obesity crisis is well overdue
As it fights COVID-19, the EU cannot drop the ball on the obesity and overweight crisis. It is high time policymakers helped people shop for healthier products by making the Nutri-Score nutrition label mandatory.