European Parliament
Robert Rochefort  (ALDE ),
in writing.
(FR)
Nutrition and health claims should only be allowed if they are true, unambiguous and not misleading. However, the new nutrition claim which was submitted to us (‘now contains X% less of [nutrient]’), could have been misleading for consumers. This claim involved reformulated products being compared with a previous version of the product, without the consumer necessarily knowing the starting level of the nutrient in question – this nutritional value could well be excessively high in comparison with other products on the market, which, not having been reformulated, would therefore not be allowed to bear a nutrition claim. A further problem is that we know that when sugars are reduced, consumers expect a reduction in energy. Yet the text would have allowed the ‘reduced fats/sugars’ claim to be made even when the product’s energy content was still equal to the energy contained in a similar product. Finally, the new claims might have led to confusion with existing claims, such as ‘reduced [nutrient]’ and ‘light/lite’, for which the requirements are, in fact, stricter. For these reasons, in this vote, I rejected the draft amendment of the regulation on nutrition claims.

