Madam, – The chief executive of the Irish Heart Foundation Michael O’Shea (August 3rd) challenges the food industry to focus its energies on reformulating products to be lower in fat, sugar and salt, rather than on opposing the “traffic light” food-labelling system favoured by a few.
Yesterday your paper reported that Kellogg will reduce sugar in the entire Coco Pops cereal range by 15 per cent by the middle of next year. In addition, we are adding vitamin D. A portion of Coco Pops will now provide around 10 per cent of a child’s Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) of sugar, and the same proportion of a child’s GDA of vitamin D.
Which brings us to the huge limitation of the traffic light food labelling system. Categorising foods according to the colours of traffic lights is at best simplistic and at worst misleading. Modern consumers are very aware of nutrition and they tell us that they find the more detailed factual information we provide through the GDA-labelling system more helpful.
Kellogg put nutrition labelling on its packs back in the 1930s. We believed consumers were ready for such information then, and we believe now that they are ready for the comprehensive but clear information given by a GDA label.
Finally Mr O’ Shea asserts that the food industry has spent €1 billion “lobbying MEPs to vote against traffic lights”. This is a gross exaggeration. – Yours, etc,