The EU Parliament received the Council's green light for the provisional agreement reached last week on new EU legislation on food labelling.
The draft legislation aims to harmonise existing rules on information that is compulsory on all labels.
The negotiating team agreed that:
•key nutritional information, such as energy content and amounts of fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar, protein and salt, must be indicated in a legible tabular form on the packaging;
•allergenic substances must be highlighted in the ingredient list;
•the origin of certain foods such as beef, honey, olive oil, fresh fruit and vegetables must be stated on the label;
•provision of further information on vegetable oil;
•food should not be labelled in a way that could mislead consumers; and
•meat consisting of combined meat parts must be labelled as "formed meat," and the same will apply to "formed fish." Many MEPs also wished to apply the requirement to indicate the country of origin to additional products (notably milk and dairy products and other single ingredient product or meat that is used as an ingredient), but this suggestion was rejected by the Council.
And what about nano?
Following the failure of the approval of the Novel Food Regulation, which also contained provisions on the use of nanotechnologies in food, a definition of nanomaterials is again under discussion in the framework of this proposal on food labelling.
At this stage the proposed definition of nano reads as follows : "engineered nanomaterial means any intentional produced material that has one or more dimensions of the order of 100nm (nanometre) or less, or that is composed of discrete functional parts, either internally or at the surface, many of which have one or more dimensions of the order of 100nm or less, including structures, agglomerates or aggregates, which may have a size above the order of 100nm but retain properties that are characteristic of the nanoscale".
The presence of those ingredients must be indicated on the label by the word "nano" in brackets.
