In 2011 the European institutions adopted the Regulation 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers. The new rules on food labelling are supposed to be applied only as of December 2014 (or as of December 2016 when nutrition declarations are concerned), but since it takes awhile for the industry to change its packaging and marketing strategies we should start hearing more and more about the implementation' problems of these rules soon. Indeed, this week UK's Farmers Guardian reported on British worries related to the labelling of meat products, e.g., that the new labelling won't account for the animal's country of birth but only country of reading and slaughter, which means that in case of a Dutch cow or pig being brought to the UK a few months before slaughter, the label could just identify it as a British cow. (New EU meat labelling laws 'could mislead consumers') Our readers may be interested in the Q&A document from January this year, where an expert Working Group answered certain questions as to what is expected from the industry sector and how new rules would impact consumer protection.
