Consumers both want and deserve transparent information about the products they buy. That information must be fully accessible: the digital label can provide it better than paper. The EU must fully embrace and lead this trend.
Pernod Ricard is the world’s No.2 producer of wines and spirits and owns 16 of the Top 100 Spirits Brands in its portfolio of over 240 premium brands distributed over in 160 markets, such as Absolut Vodka, Chivas Regal Scotch Whisky, and Havana Club rum. The Group was the first global beverage business to include the pregnancy logo across Europe in 2008, and recently launched a digital label to inform consumers about its products’ content and health information with related to alcohol consumption.
In its communication with “A Farm to Fork Strategy for a fair, healthy and sustainable food system” released on 20 May 2020, The European Commission introduced the need for “Exploring new ways to provide information to consumers through other means including digital”.
It was further improved on 13 November 2020, with the “New Consumer Agenda – Strengthening consumer resilience for sustainable recovery“where the ambition is “empowering consumers to check the reliability of information, make comparisons between products, but also inform them in a more holistic way about their effects on the environment […] in accessible, innovative and attractive ways, for example through smartphone applications and websites“.
Consumers both want and deserve transparent information about the products they buy, and that information should be easy to access and straight to the point – whether it’s about nutritional value, health information, geographic origin, or the environmental footprint of the product.
Not all consumers are interested in the same aspects: some want to know more about nutritional properties, others about how the product affects the environment, others also about specific health effects . This inevitably leads to information overload on physical labels, which means that individual pieces of information are less visible, as well as reduced font size and limited language diversity to accommodate all this information, and other issues.
Very little information
Digital labeling makes the marriage of convenience and transparency a reality. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, digital labeling is now a mainstream reality that must be fully embraced by a change in the EU’s consumer information policy, and is fully in line with the EU’s desire to change in its digital, in line with the Green Deal and wider New. Consumer Agenda. In this way, the digital label empowers European consumers to play an active role in the green and digital transitions.
Digital technology, through geo-localization, offers consumers the possibility of having access to personal and relevant information, directly accessible in their own language, empowering them to make better informed decisions. an, sustainable choices, anytime, anywhere.
The European Wine and Spirits industries are thriving
Various sectors are now exploring digital labeling solutions to empower consumers by giving them access to information at the press of a button. In Europe, the spirits industry signed a Memorandum of Understanding in June 2019 to voluntarily display calorie information on labels, and to provide the nutritional value of the product and a full list of ingredients online.
Together, the European wine and spirits industry associations launched the U-Label platformwhich provides an e-label solution to all EU producers based on QR code technology, allowing them to easily share information with consumers online, including ingredients and nutritional values.
What about Pernod Ricard?
Pernod Ricard is also actively leading the development of digital solutions for better consumer information, and has recently created eLabel’s own solution consistent with EU industry commitments.
Thanks to eLabel, every bottle sold by a Pernod Ricard brand will soon carry its own QR code on its back label. When scanned with a smartphone it will redirect consumers directly to a platform where they can access, in an easily accessible place, relevant information for each product, including:
- The list of ingredients and full nutritional information provided by Pernod Ricard, together with the European wine and spirits associations,
- Information about the health risks associated with alcohol consumption, and where to find relevant information in their country,
- Responsible drinking guidelines issued by government authorities in their country, including information about standard drinks and who should not drink alcohol, as well as a link to a website on consumer information.
Consumer friendly information in the market
Digitalization will upgrade the way organizations do business by providing instant access to updated, unlimited, and tailored product information. Not only is it a way to better inform consumers more accurately and more quickly, digital is also a new impetus for more sustainable solutions.
It also allows the flow of information within the internal market, avoiding placing additional burdens and operational costs on economic operators, giving them more agility to provide immediately updated information to to consumers; and promotes EU products inside and outside Europe.
Changing physical labels takes months and years to become a reality for consumers, due to the time it takes to design, print, package, ship, and store the newly labeled product, before it reaches the store shelves. But going digital will accelerate changes. While the physical labels remain the same, the companies’ internal databases change more quickly: no printing, no shipping, no storage.
#YesWeScan
The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to less physical interaction, but naturally paves the way for digital solutions to become more advanced and more viable. We should recognize that digital interaction is now a tangible, common reality in people’s lives, largely influencing and adding value to their consumer journey.
As a concrete example, a digital survey conducted by McKinsey in 2020 in 17 European countries shows that the number of industries accessed digitally by consumers went from 81% before the Covid-19 pandemic to 95% in May 2020.
The European Union cannot continue to ignore the largest part of its consumers who are willing to turn to new digital solutions to access meaningful information about the products they enjoy.
Europe to lead the way
The digital labeling revolution has just begun, and European policies must continue to strive towards more efficient and innovative solutions to inform citizens of what they consume. This can be done in a similar way to the solution recently adopted for the wine sector within the new framework of the Common Agricultural Policy, which includes a digital option for the indication of ingredients and nutritional information.
Although the EU continues to pursue its digital transformation agenda, it must act and pave the way for real leadership in digital consumer information: if it does not want to be left behind, it must adapt to the new digitalized solutions that are now a reality.
