Last month, the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved the new Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT), which aims to regulate and restrict ambiguous and deceptive claims made by companies about the environmental sustainability of their products. once implemented, the directive is poised to affect stakeholders in the food and nutrition industry.

“We do not want each and every company to be fined,” Dimitri Vergne, sustainability team leader at the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), tells Nutrition Insight. “What we want is for businesses to consider carefully before engaging in such communication. The aim is to ensure that only those who have something to sell, who really are making an effort, can make ‘green’ claims.”

“It will require more effort, but it will mean that only those who are confident will get a competitive selling advantage. What we want is ultimately for these companies, which are taking their role seriously, to benefit in terms of how they are seen by the consumer,” he adds.

The Directive
Set to be soon transposed into national law across EU member states in the next two years, the new directive aims to prevent companies from making unsubstantiated claims about the environmental sustainability of their products.

“Generic claims will be banned. You cannot simply say that you’re ‘carbon neutral’, that you’re ‘sustainable’ or that ‘you’re good for the planet’. The ban on these claims applies across sectors,” Vergne asserts. “In the case of the nutrition and food industry, when you go into a supermarket, you quite often see green logos without any real substantiation.”

“We expect a lot of these very generic claims of environmental and social nature to disappear from the market.”

According to the European Environmental Bureau, some of the most commonly “misleading” claims include those that a product is “carbon-neutral,” “zero emission” or “climate positive.”

“Our point of view on carbon neutrality claims has always been that even if a company has the best offsetting program out there, it is never scientifically viable to say that a product is carbon neutral,” he argues. “It is never true — nothing is carbon neutral.”

“Another aspect that will be covered concerns many companies’ tendency to communicate about future environmental performance. For example, saying that ‘by 2040 we will have cut our impact on biodiversity by a certain amount’, or ‘we will be completely carbon neutral,’” Vergne continues.

“From now on, these companies won’t be allowed to do that unless they show they have put in place a concrete plan with timeline milestones and external review, which actually aim to deliver on these commitments.”

Consumer trust
The key focus of the directive is to improve consumer trust in communication regarding the environmental sustainability of products and to facilitate easier recognition of truly sustainable options.

“The survey that we conducted last year, released last November, shows that people are just lost,” Vergne states. “People are bombarded with environmental information, and they don’t really know who to trust — to be frank, it’s perfectly understandable.”

Another study conducted by the European Commission and published in 2014 reveals that 76% of products on the EU market carry explicit or implicit environmental claims, with more than half of these shown to be vague.

One of the questions posed in the 2023 BEUC survey on consumers’ ability to spot greenwashing asked if being exposed to greenwashing harms the consumer’s trust in green claims, with the majority of respondents saying yes.

“This shows that the fact that we have some rogue players out there damages the trust in green communications overall, although we have many companies that are taking sustainability seriously. So, it is a competitive question, not just a question of consumer trust. The directive will make sure that the companies which truly make the effort get credit for it.”

“What we expect is that if there are much stricter rules and much stronger enforcement mechanisms, we expect that trust in these labels and claims will also be higher. Of course, this will take time — it won’t happen overnight.”

Inspired by Nutrition and Health law
Vergne argues that certain aspects of the new legislation will not be so unfamiliar to players in the nutrition and health space, as aspects of the directive on greenwashing have been influenced by the EU’s strict Nutrition and Health Claims regulations.

“The Nutrition and Health Claim legislation is a proxy for what needs to happen in terms of pre-approval. It is a good example of what should be done. Since it was put in place, we’ve seen a lot less misleading and unsubstantiated nutrition and health claims.”

“However, this does not mean that the food and nutrition sector will not be impacted. When companies in that space communicate about their green credentials, this will be covered by the new directive on greenwashing, rather than that on nutrition and health.”

“If a meat producer wants to communicate about its CO2 footprint, they will fall under the green claims directive, and they’ll have to abide by its rule,” Vergne outlines.