New food labels could impact grocery store visits

New potential labels coming to Canadian foods could impact how people shop at the grocery store.

The new rules proposed by Health Canada could see products with 15 per cent or more of the recommended daily intakes of sodium, sugar and saturated require a new label warning about how unhealthy the product is.

This would affect ground beef and pork.

Sylvain Charlebois, the director of the agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, suggests the labels aren’t a terrible thing for the country.

“There’s widespread support for these labels. Some countries in Europe have actually gone ahead with these labels and they do work,” he explained.

“They do discourage consumers from buying certain products. With these labels, they often eliminate products from the market because grocers aren’t necessarily interested in selling a product that is labelled unhealthy.”

While the labelling discourages some customers, Charlebois feels that isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it forces producers to look into reformulating their products so they can become healthier and not need a label.

But he adds Canada’s suggested rules surrounding the new labels put a lot of products on the store shelf into question.

“Every country has gone ahead with a list of exemptions and this is where Health Canada’s approach is a little awkward,” he stated.

“There are 16 different sub-categories including dairy products, but ground meat is not excluded except for extra lean, which doesn’t make much sense because if you look at Health Canada’s threshold, ground meat once cooked would comply with the threshold set by Health Canada.

“A lot of people are left wondering, ‘What is going on there?’ ”

By leaving only extra lean ground meat exempt from the label, Charlebois thinks it could actually scare off consumers and grocers from buying the products.

“I think it will eliminate ground meat altogether from stores. Grocers won’t be interested in selling a product labelled as unhealthy,” he predicted. “People are saying they won’t mind the label (and) they’ll keep on buying. The problem is once they show up at the grocery store, those products won’t be available at all.”

He adds 50 per cent of all beef sold in Canada is ground beef.

“So you’re basically discriminating against a product that is adored and loved by Canadians,” Charlebois added. “If Health Canada goes ahead with the proposal as presented, you’re likely only going to see extra lean ground meat on the market, and that product is very expensive.

“You’re basically making inflation a worst problem at the meat counter for Canadians overall.”

No official decision has been made on the Health Canada proposal.