As part of JA PreventNCD's work on regulation and taxation, and specifically the task on improving the consumer food environment, a report has been developed to explore how public policies can support food reformulation. The report presents the initial work undertaken in this area and highlights its potential contribution to healthier food environments.
This report provides a state of play of the nutritional composition of the European food supply. The food offer of 19 countries that contributed to Best-ReMaP (Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia) is compared by analysing the products available on the market at a given time. Products belonging to five food categories (Bread products, Breakfast cereals, Delicatessen meats and similar, Fresh dairy desserts and products, Soft drinks), divided into more than 100 subcategories, are analysed. The report also presents a benchmark of labelling parameters such as portion size and front-of-pack labelling, and an analysis of the nutritional values of the products at the subcategory level. For each food category, nutrient and country, a summary of nutrition policies linked with the results is provided. Additionally, an overview of the Euromonitor data is given and a comparison between the Best-ReMaP and Euromonitor datasets is performed, in order to assess the representativeness and reliability of a structured digital source of data compared to an in-store data collection.
The main results of this report are the following:
The comparison of the food offer across the countries included in the analysis reveals major differences between European countries. The results show variations both in terms of number of references collected by subcategory in each country and in terms of proportion of each subcategory among all products collected. For data collected between 2020 and 2023, the results highlight the low prevalence and high variability in the use of front-of-pack labelling across Europe, shaped by differences between categories and countries. The proportions of products without front-of-pack labelling range from a minimum of 12% (Breakfast cereals in Ireland) to a maximum of 100% (all categories in Croatia, probably linked to a poor reporting of this labelling parameter, and Delicatessen meats in Finland and Slovenia).
The analysis of reported portion sizes reveals differences between countries: there is a high degree of consistency in portion sizes across participating countries for soft drinks, with the 250-mL portion being the most common in most European countries. In contrast, portion sizes reported for fresh dairy products and desserts show a high variability both within and between countries.
A cross-country comparison of the distribution of nutritional values in sugar, saturated fat, salt, and fibre reveals that most subcategories show significant differences in mean nutrient content across countries. For example, for traditional muesli flakes, the mean sugar content ranges from 12.4 g per 100 g for Finland to 18.8 g per 100 g for Bosnia, while the mean fibre content ranges from 6.3 g per 100 g for Hungary to 10.3 g per 100 g for Finland and Portugal. For sugar-sweetened colas, the mean sugar content ranges from 8.8 g per 100 mL for Croatia (with a low number of products n = 4) to 11 g per 100 mL for Hungary. This shows that results vary considerably across countries and subcategories, and that there is overall room for reformulation, both within countries, where a wide range of values is observed, and between countries, where similar products (i.e., those belonging to a same subcategory) display different content ranges across Europe.
This work also demonstrates the importance of making nutritional comparisons (across countries and within a country) at the subcategory level, in order to analyse comparable products and identify relevant margins of improvement depending on the type of product, as more macro comparisons (at category level) may lead to compare very different products.
Finally, such a nutritional overview is highly dependent on the amount and quality of the data collected. The classical in-store approach, carried out during Best-ReMaP is burdensome. Digital data sources therefore appear to be an attractive solution. However, the evaluation of Euromonitor data shows that the quality of these digital sources does not appear enough sufficient in a context of tracking food reformulation. Future significant quality improvements would be required to lead to a reassessment of these digital data sources.
The next step in this work is to follow the evolution of the food offer and the nutritional content over time, by comparing the results of 2 different data collections and to benchmark these evolutions between the participating countries. The final step will be to assess the impact of the reformulations observed on the nutrient intake of the population (adults and children).
