Romania’s Nutri-Score Plan on Hold After E.U. Objections

Summary

The European Commission has warned Romania that its plan to intro­duce Nutri-Score may vio­late EU reg­u­la­tions and needs to be reviewed before imple­men­ta­tion, cit­ing con­cerns about clar­ity, poten­tial bar­ri­ers for food pro­duc­ers, and legal cer­tainty. The objec­tions do not reject Nutri-Score itself, but rather urge Romania to revise the draft, intro­duce trans­par­ent cal­cu­la­tion meth­ods, and clar­ify pro­ce­dures for appeals or dis­putes before mov­ing for­ward with the imple­men­ta­tion.

The European Commission has warned Romania that its draft plan to intro­duce Nutri-Score may vio­late EU reg­u­la­tions and should be reviewed before tak­ing effect at the end of the year.

In its detailed opin­ion, the Commission stated that the Romanian draft fails to address sev­eral crit­i­cal issues sur­round­ing the adop­tion of the French-designed front-of-pack label­ing sys­tem (FOPL).

Nutri-Score is a traf­fic-light-style food label that uses a com­bi­na­tion of five coor­di­nated col­ors and let­ters to rate the health­i­ness of a pack­aged food item based on its fat, sugar, salt, and calo­rie con­tent per 100 grams or mil­li­liters serv­ing. The ​“Green A” indi­cates the health­i­est option, and ​“Red E” denotes the least nutri­tious.

The sys­tem, designed to pro­vide con­sumers with a quick visual ref­er­ence, has been pro­moted by health author­i­ties in sev­eral EU coun­tries as a tool to encour­age health­ier diets.

Brussels ques­tioned whether the Romanian author­i­ties had con­vinc­ingly demon­strated that Nutri-Score is the most suit­able tool com­pared to other avail­able label­ing sys­tems.

The opin­ion also noted that the draft failed to explain how the expected ben­e­fits of intro­duc­ing Nutri-Score would out­weigh the reg­u­la­tory and eco­nomic bur­dens for food pro­duc­ers and retail­ers.

The Commission fur­ther warned that the mea­sure could cre­ate bar­ri­ers for food prod­ucts made else­where in the EU and sold in Romania if safe­guards are not intro­duced.

Such bar­ri­ers could result from dif­fer­ences in com­pli­ance costs, poten­tially dis­ad­van­tag­ing pro­duc­ers out­side Romania or dis­tort­ing com­pe­ti­tion inside the sin­gle mar­ket.

According to this opin­ion, the draft also lacks legal cer­tainty. It does not clearly define how the Nutri-Score label would be applied, updated or enforced.

Without such clar­ity, both busi­nesses and reg­u­la­tors could be left with­out a reli­able frame­work, rais­ing con­cerns about how the sys­tem would oper­ate in prac­tice and how dis­putes would be han­dled.

Commission offi­cials empha­sized that any national label­ing scheme must remain vol­un­tary, avoid mis­lead­ing con­sumers, and com­ply with exist­ing EU food infor­ma­tion reg­u­la­tions.

The objec­tions do not amount to a rejec­tion of Nutri-Score itself or of its poten­tial intro­duc­tion in Romania.

However, they mean the author­i­ties must go back to the draw­ing board before imple­men­ta­tion.

To move for­ward, Brussels urged Romania to revise the draft text, intro­duce trans­par­ent cal­cu­la­tion meth­ods, define objec­tive cri­te­ria, estab­lish effec­tive mon­i­tor­ing mech­a­nisms, and clar­ify pro­ce­dures for appeals or dis­putes.

The Commission’s inter­ven­tion has prac­ti­cal con­se­quences as the Nutri-Score adop­tion is now on hold for at least three months.

During this stand­still period, Romanian author­i­ties are required to pro­vide the Commission with a list of the amend­ments they intend to intro­duce.

If they fail to do so, the draft could still tech­ni­cally take effect at the end of the year. Such an out­come appears unlikely, since ignor­ing the Commission’s objec­tions would almost cer­tainly trig­ger infringe­ment pro­ceed­ings by Brussels or legal chal­lenges from other mem­ber states.

The detailed opin­ion marks the lat­est set­back for Nutri-Score in Romania.

Before being included in a for­mal draft law, the scheme had even been banned by the National Authority for Consumers Protection (ANPC) due to a tech­ni­cal issue with label­ing rules.

That deci­sion was later reversed, paving the way for the cur­rent draft, but the process has remained con­tro­ver­sial and uncer­tain.

A key chal­lenge for Nutri-Score, in Romania as else­where, lies in the reg­u­lar updates to the algo­rithm that under­pins its food rat­ings.

These revi­sions directly affect how cer­tain pop­u­lar prod­ucts are clas­si­fied.

France, where Nutri-Score was con­ceived and first intro­duced, only recently adopted the lat­est algo­rithm update.

That update pro­moted olive oils from ​“Yellow C” to ​“Light-green B.” The same update had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on rat­ings for dairy prod­ucts and sugar-free drinks.

Implementing such changes is often com­plex, as they may alter the mar­ket posi­tion of entire prod­uct cat­e­gories and pro­voke oppo­si­tion from pro­duc­ers unhappy with the results.

Despite these con­tro­ver­sies, Nutri-Score remains oper­a­tional in sev­eral European mar­kets.

It has been offi­cially adopted vol­un­tar­ily by France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and Portugal.

Outside the EU, Switzerland has also intro­duced the scheme, although some major com­pa­nies have recently started phas­ing it out, and some leg­is­la­tors have called for its repeal.

At the EU level, Nutri-Score has been part of a long and heated debate about the need for a har­mo­nized front-of-pack nutri­tion label.

As part of the Green Deal, the European Commission once pledged to pro­pose a manda­tory, EU-wide sys­tem.

However, amid the grow­ing divi­sions between mem­ber states, the Commission has so far refrained from mov­ing for­ward with such a pro­posal.