HomeFoodCountry-of-origin labellingWhat's in a label?

In this report

Related Information

Reports:

Fruit and vegetables

close Print
- Print page
- Print whole report
print
comments (3)
share

Country-of-origin labelling Updated: 09 Mar 2009

What's in a label?

Dr Meriel Watts, co-ordinator of the Pesticide Action Network Aotearoa New Zealand, is a long-time supporter of country-of-origin labelling. And she finds it frustrating how often this labelling is wrong, misleading or inconsistent.

Meriel has many examples of supermarket stuff-ups: Italian kiwifruit on the bag, New Zealand on the price ticket; Australian capsicums with a "Product of NZ" tag; mince that's a "Product of New Zealand or Australia". Those are just three of Meriel's examples.

She once found ginger with no country-of-origin labelling. She doesn't use Chinese ginger because it has an insecticide she chooses to avoid - so when the produce manager couldn't tell her where the ginger came from, Meriel went home ginger-less.

Andrea from New Plymouth was disappointed to find her local New World had labelled grapes and pears from the US as coming from New Zealand. Andrea is concerned that supermarkets are making a mockery of food labelling and aren't giving consumers accurate information.

True or false?

The bar code tells you where the product is made.

False - it isn't that simple. The first three numbers of a bar code typically represent a country code but this is where the code is assigned, not necessarily where the product came from.

For example, the company may have its head office in South Africa, so has the code "600". But all the products may be made in Korea. The products would still have the "600" code. There may be a fair degree of correlation but it isn't watertight.