Food labeling in Mexico
[7] In 2016, the National Health and Nutrition Survey (Spanish: Encuesta Nacional de Salud y Nutrición; ENSANUT) was performed.
Inspired by their system, the INSP decided to form a committee of national academic experts on the front-of-package labeling of food and non-alcoholic beverages in order to define a new regulation.
[7] The Secretariat of Economy (SE) and the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risk held organized working groups which resulted in a standard draft, which was submitted for consultation from 11 October to 10 December 2019, where 5,200 comments were received.
[10] Simultaneously, civil society organizations created the Alianza por la Salud Alimentaria (Alliance for Food Health), which carried out a public campaign to inform the population about the efforts.
[9] On 29 October 2019, reforms and additions to the Mexican General Health Law were approved, including the new front-of-package labeling model.
On 27 March 2020, the Official Journal of the Federation published in the norm NOM-051-SCFI/SSA1-2010 updates that determined that all food and non-alcoholic beverage packaging and containers must display the approved seals.
[10] The World Health Organization the gave SALUD an award for the Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases due to the front-of-package update.
[49][50] In a survey conducted a few days after the second front-of-package system was officially implemented, Food Navigator found that only 10% of respondents took them into consideration.
[52] In 2020, Guadalupe López Rodríguez, nutritionist and researcher of the Autonomous University of Hidalgo State, commented that if the Chilean system is taken as a basis, the labels would have a significant impact on the population during the first stage of implementation.
[53] Cuauhtémoc Rivera, president of the Alianza Nacional de Pequeños Comerciantes (National Alliance of Small Merchants), said that consumers were initially found to avoid products with seals, but that eventually purchases normalized.
Jonás Murillo, vice-president of the Food, Beverages and Tobacco Commission of the Confederation of Industrial Chambers explained that consumers preferred larger versions of products with labels to smaller ones—which are healthier.
Murillo also noted that the key problem of the system is that it was not applied correctly and, as an example, he compared a salad with dressing and a bottle of soft drink concluding that although their nutritional value is different, both have the same number of labels.
