Front-of-pack nutrition labelling: a European patchwork to manage market by market
The harmonised front-of-pack nutrition scheme promised by the Farm to Fork strategy never materialised. In 2025 the Commission dropped plans for a single mandatory system and signalled that any future proposal would "not copy any existing system".
The result: Nutri-Score, Keyhole, traffic-light logos and national schemes keep coexisting. The same product sold in several countries may have to display different logos, computed under different rules.
One product, several displays
Nutri-Score is adopted voluntarily by several states (France, Belgium, Spain, Germany…), while other markets use other logos or none. For an exported portfolio, that means recomputing and re-displaying the nutrition information by destination.
Any reformulation — sugar reduction, added fibre — can flip a grade and must be reflected across every affected market.
The calculation, a fragile point of truth
The scoring algorithms evolve (the Nutri-Score algorithm has been revised), and the score depends on precise nutritional values. A calculation done in a spreadsheet, at one point in time, quickly becomes stale or inconsistent across teams.
The risk: information out of sync
When nutritional values, scores and label artwork live in separate files, a reformulation creates a gap: the recipe changes, but the displayed label stays the old one. It is a classic source of non-compliance and recalls.
What this means for your product data
Managing this patchwork means computing scores from the real nutritional values, recomputing them automatically at each reformulation, and knowing which logo applies in which market.
A PLM that consolidates nutritional values and derives labelling indicators at formulation time guarantees the display always follows the recipe. crumble-ai treats the score and the label as derived data, never frozen.
Is your portfolio ready?
See how crumble-ai continuously audits your recipes and blocks non-conformities at the source.
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