Answer:

The labelling of food is increasingly important for manufacturers, retailers and consumers as well. Labelling is a significant element of marketing and allows consumers to make an intelligent decision, or to find the product suited to their special needs. Regulation of this field is one of the central issues in food-related legislation. Government organisations should ensure that voluntary initiatives comply with the legal provisions in effect. Our national strategy for food labelling should form part of a comprehensive health and dietary policy, similarly to many other EU countries. The revision of legislation concerning food labelling has been on the agenda of legislators in the EU for years. The proposed text of a new regulation for the “labelling of food for informing consumers” was published by the EU Commission on 30. January 2008. This is intended to be far more than new rules for labelling. It is meant to replace guidelines with simpler, more transparent and clearly more consumer-focused legislation. We are headed towards developing a uniform set of rules in the EU for food labelling. The proposed text of the new regulation is the result of several years’ work and is based on a number of studies. Comprehensive surveys have been carried out by the Commission and the opinions of both government organisations and NGO-s have been taken into consideration. Mandatory information shall be displayed on food labels in a uniform way everywhere in the EU, providing the same level of protection for consumers in all member states. For example, nutritional values will be mandatory element of labels and readability criteria will be defined more precisely than at present. A number of different opinions have clashed during preparatory work at both national and EU level. This is why it was very important to have consumers, manufacturers, retailers, government organisations and independent experts participate in the entire process of working out the new regulation. The voluntary labelling of nutritional value has appeared in Hungary primarily as a result of an initiative launched by multinational companies. At the moment, we are unable to select the best one from the various voluntary labelling systems used in different EU member countries. Competent authorities participate in the activities of TÉT Platform, which promotes the use of the INBÉ labelling system. Dialogue between the different market players is very important and one of the best things about voluntary systems is that they have succeeded in getting all parties together to work for a common objective.