Consumers' food choice and healthfulness perception - the impact of front-of-package nutrition labelling systems (FoPL) on tomato products

Consumers are quite aware about the relation between diet and health. Moreover, nutritional risk factors are recognized as key drivers of different chronic diseases as cardiovascular disease and obesity. Front-of-package nutrition labelling systems (FoPL) are considered a valuable tool to discriminate the nutritional quality allowing consumers for quick decision-making about the nutritional content or relative healthfulness of a product. However, as industry and organizations, have implemented different front-of-package (FOP) nutrition labelling systems in different countries, consumer are quite confused and consider that FOP nutrition labelling is a marketing, rather than a public health strategy. At present there is not a unique system approved within Europe or USA, this situation affects industry, distributors and consumers. If the final goal is to improve consumers' understanding of the nutritional quality of food products in order to help on healthy food choices, front-of-package labelling pretends to be an efficient tool, but to be useful in purchasing situations, consumers need to understand the information provided. The purpose of this contribution is to provide an update on the different FoPL nutrition labelling systems already available worldwide as the one implemented in Australia through the Health stars, in UK by Food Standards Agency (FSA) and France through Nutri-Score, as well as to examine the implications of its application on tomato products in order to help industry, quality and marketing professional to put their products in value.