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.