The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has told the industry that it will not call on the government to make calorie labelling compulsory.
Tim Smith, chief executive of the FSA, told delegates at M&C Report’s Restaurant Conference held at the Mayfair Hotel that he believed that the scheme would work better on a voluntary basis and if it had the cooperation of the restaurant sector.
Smith said: “We won’t legislate, we will advise the government that a collaborative approach with the industry is the most effective method.
“We see no benefit in a legislative framework, it needs to be led by people in the industry and driven by European framework.”
He said that the results of the four-month trial where 21 companies from the sector had worked with the FSA to introduce calorie labelling in some or all of their stores were set to be published in the next 10 days.
Smith said that the UK would not go down the US route of introducing regulation to force the industry to comply like the government in New York had done.
He said that although the FSA was still trying to reduce the three core schemes currently being used down to one, it was likely that the calorie system would be used rather than the traffic light system.
Alison Vickers, head of international development at Yo! Sushi, pointed out that the company had voluntarily introduced the traffic light labelling scheme at its stores at a significant cost in both money and time and that the FSA had failed to inform it that it now favoured a calorie system.
Smith said that some companies had jumped ahead and the FSA was now taking it slower as there was no point in proposing something to government that wouldn’t actually work.
Smith said: “While in the retail sector a traffic light system works, in the eating out sector it is simpler to go for calories."
Emma Woods, marketing director of Pizza Express, highlighted the concerns that the restaurant sector had over putting calories counts on their menus, saying that when people went out to eat in the evening they were likely to consume a significant chunk of their GDA, but that needed to be put in context and many people balanced this out by having a lighter lunch.
Smith agreed that the FSA needed to find a solution to the problem without turning consumers away from restaurants.
The companies involved in the FSA trial, which included McDonald’s Mitchells & Butlers, Pret a Manger, The Real Greek, Subway, agreed to display calorie information for food items, print calorie information on menu boards and ensure that the information was clear and visible at the point of sale.
