If there is a business case for healthy food, what can the EU do to promote it?
When we adopted the revised Lisbon strategy in 2005, the European Council adopted Key Performance Indicators (KPI). One of the KPIs for Lisbon now is the Healthy Life Years (HLY). Those who made that decision understood that there is a business case for healthy citizens. If people have healthy, longer lives, the GDP increases. It is not a surprise, they stay in the work life longer, they earn more, they spend more, they don't have to save it all for nursing. We don't have that yet in Europe. The difference between life-expectancy at birth in Sweden and Lithuania is huge, 15 years. Everybody is living longer, but what proportion of that longevity is actually healthy life years? Here again there are big variations between the EU-25. The economic case for health is, however, increasingly accepted.
For the food chain the business case is in the sales. The best data on that is currently coming from Tesco. Their data on front-pack labelling of products and sales show that within two-three month period the sales, for example, of products labelled "70% of daily intake of saturated fats" dropped considerably, whereas the products labelled "low amounts of saturated fats or salt" increased/gained in sales. The business case is increasingly understood. The problem is: does business case exist also for retailers at the lower end of the market, of the value chain. Is the message going through faster now? Here, public policy intervention can say to business: accelerate the move of the market, the market is moving, let's move faster. Secondly, the public authorities can help the market to be ready for this change.
An illustration on this can be done with salt: before a public education campaign on how too much salt is bad for your health, the UK citizens’ tasting groups were reluctant to even taste products with reduced amounts of salt. After the campaign they accepted comparative tasting of reduced salt offerings. They still wanted the products to be tasty but recognized that there is a reason to looking at the issue. There is an interaction between public education and the market.
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