Australians eating healthier

A recent survey by an independent market analyst, Datamonitor, has shown that more than 75% of Australians are concerned about the importance of their health and maintaining it. Around 71% of those surveyed are also making a deliberate attempt to eat healthily “most” or “all of the time”.

This also applies to alcoholic purchases, according to Katrina Diamonon, Consumer Markets Analyst for Datamonitor, with more than a quarter of those surveyed making healthy choices.

The current FSANZ Labelling Review will no doubt find the results of the survey of great interest. Food manufacturers should be close attention as well, as the results from this survey will have far reaching effects and reinforces the belief in the food industry that consumers are looking for more information on food and drink labels. They are then using this information to make purchasing choices. This will obviously have a significant impact on new and existing product labelling.

48% of the Australians surveyed report that they rely on the product’s nutritional information shown on the packaging to help them make purchasing choices, compared to a global average of 44%.

“This attentiveness puts additional pressure on food and beverage manufacturers to respond via effective product reformulation that is communicated in an engaging, believable manner,” Diamonon advised.

Of particular interest to those surveyed are the usual suspects of low or no added sugar (46%) and low or reduced fat (44%), even though there are new trends like gluten free or soy rich.

“The implication is that, while newer health considerations offer considerable future potential, they are not yet mass market considerations,” Diamonon noted. “Marketers must therefore adopt tempered expectations when it comes to using the newest ‘vogue ingredients’ in health-driven product reformulation.”

Salt is emerging as a distinct issue in the minds of Australians due to the increasing public knowledge of the relationship between our health and what we eat and drink. According to many groups, including the Australian Division of World Action on Salt and Health (AWASH), this will be one of the most significant issues in food labelling in 2010. AWASH has launched a program called “Drop the Salt!”, which aims to reduce salt consumption by Australians to only 6 grams by 2012.

Even though manufacturers will be revising product composition and labelling to address this increasing consumer expectation of “healthier” foods and easy to understand information, there is a problem. There seems to be an increasing scepticism by consumers of product labelling. Manufacturers must follow the requirements of both the Trade Practices Act and the Food Standards Code in labelling products, so there must be no misleading claims. However, the results from the survey show that only 25% of Australians believe that any nutritional claims made are trustworthy. There needs to be some serious work done to address this significant issue, and hopefully, the Labelling Review will assist with this.

“In short, if Australians make a real effort to review the actual ingredient composition of the foods they eat, they give themselves the best chance of achieving those ever-elusive new year’s resolutions once and for all,” Diamonon concluded.