Last week, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office issued a damning statement in Athens. Two former Greek government ministers are suspected of facilitating a long-running scheme to defraud the European Union’s farm subsidy system.
According to investigators, citizens across Greece received millions of euros in EU agricultural funds for neither owned nor leased pastureland, and for work they never performed. The result has been significant financial penalties for Greece, including a €400 million fine imposed by the European Commission, and the dissolution of the national agency responsible for managing these payments.
While the political implications are serious, this episode speaks to a deeper institutional vulnerability. It illustrates what happens when a policy system is designed to appear effective rather than to deliver real-world results. This failure is rooted in appearances, formalism, and convenience—precisely the same type of failure now defining the EU’s approach to nutrition policy.
For years, the European Commission has promoted front-of-pack nutrition labelling, particularly the Nutri-Score system, as a central tool in the fight against obesity and diet-related illness. Based on a colour-coded algorithm that ranks food products from A to E, Nutri-Score is designed to simplify nutritional information and help consumers make healthier choices. Policymakers have embraced it as a cost-effective and politically feasible intervention, while France, the birthplace of Nutri-Score, has gone so far as to propose making it mandatory.
But like the Greek subsidy model, this system is delivering far less than promised.
Controlled experiments suggest that front-of-pack labels can nudge consumers toward certain choices under highly specific conditions. However, the real-world evidence increasingly shows that these behavioural shifts are too small, too inconsistent, and too short-lived to produce any measurable benefit at the population level.
A clear example comes from the United Kingdom. In April 2022, England introduced mandatory calorie labelling on menus in large food outlets, citing public health benefits and an expected reduction in obesity. A comprehensive review of 25 independent studies, published by the Cochrane Library in early 2025, assessed the overall effect of calorie labelling on consumption. Across more than 10,000 participants in the UK, France, and the United States, the average impact was a reduction of just 11 calories per meal—barely the equivalent of a single crisp. That amounts to a 1.8 percent drop in caloric intake per meal, a change so minor that it has no relevance for public health outcomes.
In the years since implementation, England has seen no significant improvement in obesity rates or diet-related health indicators. The cost to businesses has been considerable, and the policy’s effectiveness has been negligible. As Professor Tom Sanders of King’s College London put it, consumers “get fatigue from calorie labelling in the long term,” and such marginal reductions are unlikely to make any difference over time. This is not an isolated failure; it is a systemic one. It shows that even when executed on a national scale, labelling schemes consistently fall short of their public health objectives.
That failure is not only a matter of scale. It is built into the design of the system itself. Nutri-Score, like other front-of-pack labels, applies a simplified formula to assign a grade based on nutrient content per 100 grams. It does not account for how a food is produced, how it is consumed in context, or whether it has undergone industrial processing. The algorithm rewards products that are easy to manipulate—those that can be reformulated to reduce certain ingredients while preserving shelf life, sweetness, or market appeal. Unsurprisingly, this structure tends to favour large-scale industrial producers with the resources to adapt, while penalising traditional, seasonal, or artisanal foods that may be nutritionally complex but do not fit the algorithmic mould.
The result is a system that reinforces, rather than reforms, the existing food economy. Products that meet the formal criteria receive a favourable score, regardless of their environmental footprint or degree of processing. This not only misleads consumers, it distorts the incentives for producers—encouraging the development of ultra-processed items that “perform” well on labels without contributing to healthier diets overall.
Meanwhile, Europe continues to see a rise in industrialised livestock farms and the consolidation of food production around a handful of scalable, uniform models. The same incentives that make these systems efficient also make them ideal candidates for nutrition labelling schemes. They can be easily adjusted to comply with nutrient thresholds, manufactured at volume, and distributed across borders. Smaller producers, working within agroecological or local food systems, are often left behind.
What the Greek subsidy scandal and the continued reliance on front-of-pack labels have in common is a dangerous faith in superficial mechanisms. In both cases, public authorities have favoured tools that are administratively simple and politically presentable over those that demand accountability and structural reform. Labels, like subsidy paperwork, offer a sense of order—but too often, they obscure the underlying dysfunction.
If the European Union is serious about building a food system that supports health, sustainability, and equity, it must move beyond cosmetic solutions. That means addressing the root causes of poor nutrition: poverty, aggressive marketing, lack of access to fresh food, and the industrial dominance of supply chains. It means reforming subsidies, regulating advertising to children, supporting small and medium-sized producers, and investing in public health infrastructure.
Labelling, however visually appealing, is not a substitute for strategy. It is time to stop mistaking visibility for effectiveness and focus instead on the policies that actually shape what people eat, how food is produced, and who benefits from the system as it stands.
