On 4 May, the Spirits Industry signed a MoU with the European Commission on the labelling of their products. Several Healthcare Advocacy organisations, including AIM, have voiced their discontentment with the agreement as the European spirits industry is actually refraining from informing consumers at the point of sale in an easy and accessible manner. Instead of following the EU Regulation 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers, the spirits industry is granted a non-binding self-regulatory approach providing information about energy on label and information on ingredients and nutritional value online on the responsibledrinking.eu website or via QR codes. Such an approach is, in our view inappropriate given that the majority of consumers never or rarely use off-label information sources to access information on nutrition values and ingredients of alcoholic beverages – as stated in the 2017 European Commission’s report on alcohol labels.

Read the joint PR: 5.6 Joint press statement – Spirits industry afraid of their own ingredients