NNB on health claims: The outcome of Europe’s misplaced love of regulation

Since 1995 many in the food industry in Europe have been calling long and loud for an overhaul to health claim regulations and the introduction of a uniform, Europe-wide health claim system. Their argument has been that this was needed to allow products to communicate their benefits and that without it the European industry could not innovate.  

It’s a point of view that we have long disagreed with at New Nutrition Business (NNB), given the evidence that European companies have in fact created a wealth of successful, innovative brands (see every issue of NNB for the last 15 years) despite the lack of any EU-wide health claim system. Rather, the health claims-as-a-problem argument has been used by many companies as an excuse for their failures of strategy and marketing.  

Well, Europe now has a health claim system in place which is highly restrictive in nature and looks increasingly as if what it will most probably do is reduce – or even end – food and health innovation in Europe.

The outcome of the EU health claims regulation process will be that:

1. Small companies will flee from using health messages of any kind – hardly a benefit to Europe’s consumers – rather than entangle themselves in the nightmare of the health claims system.  
2. This will leaving only a few large companies to innovate in health. Only they have the financial muscle to create the science at the pharmaceutical level that EFSA is looking for.
3. The main winners from the EU’s new health claims regulation will be PR companies, who food manufacturers will turn to to help them find ways of getting their message into the media without using an overt claim.
4. Europe will slide from being a leader in health innovation to an also-ran.
5. Sooner or later the food industry will be forced to mount a legal challenge to the regulation. But given the agonisingly slow processes of the EU, that challenge could spend years in the courts.

Europe has become a place of contradictions – and the lobbyists who want to stop health claims of any kind have succeeded. It will be a place where a face cream can claim that it makes your skin healthier, with almost no science to support it, but a yoghurt can’t tell you that it contains bacteria to support your digestive system, even though the science is a hundred-fold that of a face-cream.  

It will be a place where fast-food chains can spend hundred of millions on advertising for products that contain higher levels of saturated fats and salt than are good for you, but you can’t tell someone that cranberry juice contains anthocyanins and what the specific benefits of cranberry juice are.  

The recent launch of Danone Densia bone health yoghurt in Spain  is a clue as to the direction that innovation in Europe might have to take: Densia meets a growing consumer need for products that support bone health, but it is an example of how in future brands might be forced to offer only simple generic benefits. Success will become a matter of providing the benefits in a more concentrated or convenient way than other brands, coupled with marketing and distribution muscle.

Julian Mellentin

Editor

New Nutrition Business