Junk food makers are afraid of an app that'll make you want to junk them

The instant noodle controversy has erupted again with the Supreme Court issuing notice to noodle-maker Nestle and the national consumer court for further testing of Maggi samples. The main food safety issues relating to this case were mislabelling and contamination with heavy metals.

The food safety regulations mandate nutrition labelling for all processed food products. Most packaged products now come with mandatory information about energy, protein, carbohydrates and fat printed in small fonts on their packets. While this type of labelling has generated some level of awareness among consumers, most consumers remain clueless whether the product they are buying is healthy or not.

This is because information given on labels of processed food products is given in a consumer-unfriendly manner and can leave people in confusion. Moreover, manufacturers do not share full information about ingredients and add misleading claims such as "no added sugar" or "no added MSG", as was the case in Maggi. A survey of nutrition labels done in Hyderabad showed that only 52 per cent of over 4,100 packets displayed information as mandated by the food regulator.

Because of such poor record of companies and consumers' inability to fully understand labels, health and nutrition experts have been advocating a traffic signal-type food labelling system - in which red symbol means the food is high in fats, sugar and salt, amber means it is an average choice, while green denotes healthy product.

For obvious reasons, food industry is against such explicit labelling and has been opposing it tooth and nail. Now this very food labelling system - dreaded by junk food makers - has been placed in the hands of consumers in the form of a mobile app called FoodSwitch. It has been developed by the Sydney-based George Institute for Global Health and has been introduced for Indian products, after successful run in Australia, the UK and China. The target is to introduce this app in 50 countries in five years.

The mobile application allows consumers to scan the barcode of a packaged food item and get easy-to-understand information about fat, sugar and salt levels using traffic light labelling system.

The switch also provides healthier choices for the same category of product based on overall nutritional value of foods using software that takes into account several factors important for health. FoodSwitch in India currently is backed by a database of 10,000 packaged foods compiled in collaboration with the Centre for Chronic Disease Control in India.

If a scanned product is not in the database, consumers can use phone camera to send in pictures so that they can be added.

In Australia, it started with 20,000 products but within weeks of its launch consumers sent pictures of another 26,000. "It is not perfect to begin with but we hope to grow the database through crowdsourcing in India," noted Bruce Neal, who leads the research team. Neal says the idea is to empower consumers and help them change behaviour. It's time for junk food makers to wake up.