The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), like the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, are launching a star rating system for packaged foods.
According to the ‘Health Star’ rating system, packaged foods will have a number of stars on the front of the package indicating how healthy or unhealthy they are based on the amount of salt, sugar, and fat they contain.
A team of IIM Ahmedabad (IIM-A) professors Arvind Sahay and Ranjan Kumar Ghosh, along with doctoral student Rahul Sanghvi at Dexter Consultancy, recommended the star rating system after conducting an extensive survey of over 20,000 respondents across India.
Once implemented, India will soon join a number of other countries in implementing front-of-pack labelling (FOPL) on food items to inform consumers about nutritional values in the pack.
The research report titled ‘Consumer preferences for different nutrition front-of-pack labels in India’ was recently published on the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) website.
According to sources close to the development, the system will be implemented soon after consultation with all stakeholders on recommendations.
Across the globe, some methods of FOPL include Health Star Rating (HSR), Nutriscore, Warning label, Multiple Traffic Lights (MTL) and Monochrome guideline daily amount (GDA).
For the team at IIM-A, the challenge was to recommend a system that can be ‘comprehensible, acceptable and yet effective’ keeping in mind the regional and linguistic diversity of India.
The star system was found to be the most widely accepted by different groups, followed by warning labels and color-based warnings, according to the researchers (red, orange, green). They also stated that the presence of FOPL had an impact on consumer purchasing decisions. Those with pre-existing medical conditions were also enthusiastic about the idea.