On January 6’th 2009 Sara Lee, a North American Bakery, launched their new labels to help consumers make food choices. The GDA / DV like graphics with key nutrition information is called Nutritional Spotlight. And it will appear on all of its bread, bun and bagel products beginning in January.

There are some interesting differences you may want to notice:
1) On their webpage the stated: “The percentage for sugars is not listed because the % daily value has not been established.” Nice to know that not all food industry believe we need 90 grams of sugar daily.
2) They include grams of whole grain. Good news!
3) It seems that they don’t bring %DV for calories. Also very good news!
And in their press release they wrote that folic acid will also be included.

It is not very consumer friendly if food companies each make their own version of GDA as they please.

In respons to my post on the new Smart Choices front of-pack labeling Program a friend gave me these insights related to the US:

1) Smart Choices Program has been created by an industry coalition. This means that it will likely have the lowest standards, and be largely a “positive” scheme — no foods will be labeled “bad.” But it also means this program has the best chance of being taken up quickly. All the articles talk about this appearing next year, and it may, but they have not yet decided how the scheme will be administered. (In fact, they are still accepting proposals for administration until the end of this week.)

2) NuVal is the second scheme, created by Dr. David Katz and a group of eminent health care leaders and researchers. This was formerly called ONQI (Overall Nutritional Quality Index) but has just been renamed. NuVal is short for Nutrition Value. It scores foods from 1 to 100 based on a very involved and complex algorithm. NuVal is already being tested at one supermarket chain here. In January 2009 they published sample score of hundreds of everyday items, please look here.

3) A third system has been proposed by the Nutrient-Rich Foods coalition, a coalition of academics (led by Adam Drewnowski and Vic Fulgoni) and some commodity groups. Their algorithm focuses on nutrient density of foods (a good thing) but they may have trouble competing with Smart Choice and NuVal.

Beyond this are the supermarket programs, best known of which is the Hannaford Guiding Stars.

FDA organized a 2 day Public Hearing on Use of Symbols to Communicate Nutrition Information in September 2007 which gave an excellent overview of this topic. Please see the agenda and listen to the audio from this event if you want to learn more about this topic.

Big Food companies including Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo and Unilever have with the assistance of The Keystone Center developed The Smart Choices Program in a partnership with some academicians, health and research organizations and retailers. This is their new checkmark logo.

Take a look at the qualifying criteria and share what you think of them by adding a comment below. Is the intention to avoid tougher regulation like a mandatory traffic light system? Is The Smart Choice Program a first step in quietly accepting that GDA-labeling is actually confusing and misleading to consumers? What do you think of the new nutritional criteria?

See also Marion Nestle’s blog on this topic, and Camillas comments or my second post on this topic.