Carrefour has decided to impose the adoption of the Nutri-Score on all suppliers, including major brands – such as Coca-Cola, Ferrero, Mondelez – that persist in hiding the nutritional profiles of their products.
1) Carrefour France, the letter to suppliers
Carrefour France, in a letter from its CEO Alexandre Bompard to the group’s 550 suppliers, warns that from now on, all of them will have to display the Nutri-Score on products sold online.
Anyone wishing to opt out will have to formally declare it, reports Le Parisien, and this decision will be communicated to consumers. (1)
2) Nutri-Score, the great interest of consumers
Carrefour’s initiative responds to the great interest of consumers in France in being able to understand at a glance the nutritional quality of foods and the role of each of them in the diet, according to the pyramid model of the Mediterranean diet. (2)
The National Assembly of Paris in turn – just a week earlier, on November 4, 2024 – had voted in favor of making the Nutri-Score mandatory on food labels and advertisements, as we have seen. (3) To respond to the wishes of citizens, but also for public health.
3) NutriScore and health
The epidemiological study published in September in The Lancet Regional Health Europe (Deschasaux-Tanguy et al., 2024) – conducted on a cohort of 345,533 participants, in 7 European countries, followed for 12 years – reports an increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease associated with the consumption of foods that are classified less favorably in the Nutri-Score scale. (4)
In Italy, the previous study published in The British Medical Journal (Brancaccio et al., 2024) – conducted on the Moli-Sani cohort, with 22,285 thousand adults – had in turn correlated the consumption of the food products thus identified to a higher prevalence of premature mortality. (5)
4) Name & shame
Carrefour suppliers have three months from receiving the letter to decide whether to accept the request and choose whether to process the Nutri-Score of their products themselves or let Carrefour do it. And brands that decide to oppose the request will be penalized on Carrefour sites.
‘We will indicate that the manufacturer has refused (to display the Nutri-Score, ed.) on our site and we will exclude its products from our Alternative for Better Nutrition tool,’ explains Carine Kraus, Director of Sustainable Development at Carrefour, to Le Parisien.
Marta Strinati and Dario Dongo
Notes
(1) Gwenael Bourdon. Nutri-Score: comment Carrefour see the great brands here you don’t want to see. Le Parisien. 12.11.24 https://tinyurl.com/4haazj88
(2) See the paragraph ‘Mediterranean diet’ in the previous article by Dario Dongo. NutriScore, Professor Serge Hercberg corrects the fake news of the Italian minister. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade). 8.3.23
(3) Dario Dongo. France, the Assembly gives the green light to the mandatory NutriScore. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade). 5.11.24
(4) Deschasaux-Tanguy et al. (2024). Nutritional quality of diet characterized by the Nutri-Score profiling system and cardiovascular disease risk: a prospective study in 7 European countries. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, Volume 46, 101006. Doi: DOI: 10.1016/j.lanepe.2024.101006
(5) Dario Dongo, Andrea Adelmo Della Penna. Italian scientific study confirms the effectiveness of NutriScore. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade). 7.1.23
Professional journalist since January 1995, he has worked for newspapers (Il Messaggero, Paese Sera, La Stampa) and periodicals (NumeroUno, Il Salvagente). She is the author of journalistic surveys on food, she has published the book "Reading labels to know what we eat".
Dario Dongo, lawyer and journalist, PhD in international food law, founder of WIISE (FARE - GIFT - Food Times) and Égalité.
