The Consumer Council has reiterated its support for the early implementation of the proposed mandatory labelling scheme of nutrition information for prepackaged food.
The Council has just completed a market survey as a follow-up to two previous tests conducted earlier this year on the nutrient contents of prepackaged food.
The survey inspected both the content and presentation of the nutrition information on 45 samples comprising 11 bread, 14 biscuit, 10 cereal and 10 milk products.
The survey could not find any significant market improvement in food labelling, despite the vigilance of the Council on this issue of rising concern to consumers.
Many prepackaged foods do not provide a nutrition information table on the product packaging. Of the 45 samples surveyed, one-third (15) bore no such information table at all.
But even those with nutrition content claims on the packaging, only some gave also the amount of the relevant nutrients. For example, a biscuit sample labelled with claims of "high fibre, low fat, low calories", only stated that "each piece of biscuit contains less than 1 gram of fat". That is hardly adequate to support its claims.
Clear definition of such superlatives as "high", "low", "more", "less", "extra", etc. is imperative. Many examples could be found in that samples bearing the same equivalent claims actually varied substantially in the amount of the nutrients. For example, 2 bread products both bore claims of "high fibre" but one contained 6% of the nutrient while the other 10.8%. Such claims of "high" and "low" should be standardized.
The Consumer Council believes that it is important that nutrition information should be provided in a way easily comprehensible to consumers to facilitate product comparison. Nutrition labelling will boost the image of the product creating business opportunity for the traders.
The Council, therefore, supports the use of 100 g and 100 ml as the base amount for listing out the nutrient contents as proposed by the Government in the labelling scheme.
In the survey, it was found that many samples used various values as the base, making it extremely difficult for consumers to compare the nutrient contents.
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