Food, science and healthy labels

Most recently, the focus on health has featured more explicitly in the food industry’s strategies in the global market. Front-of-pack stamps that are used to indicate “healthy” products, inspired by nutritional recommendations from national and international health institutions, can be found among the latest innovations within this health trend. The “Healthy Choice” stamp created by dutch companies Unilever and Friesland Campina in 2007 is taken as example of one of the major stamps that promote “healthy” foods currently on the market. The “Healthy Choice” stamp has created its own nutritional standards inspired by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) dietary advice. This paper proposes that the “Healthy Choice” stamp can be studied as an artifact that promotes a particular definition of what a “healthy” food is that rivals against other definitions such as those presented in the certification of organic foods, GMO free, etc… The paper takes an anti-essentialist perspective in relation to artifacts following authors such as Bijker, Latour and Callon, so as to argue that the stamp does not necessarily have a single use or promotes a “healthy” quality that can be simply taken as a given. This “healthy” quality at issue is achieved through a qualification process: “behind” the stamp there’s a network of associations that involves all sorts of actors such as food companies, certification organizations, laboratories, experts, scientific articles, nutritional standards – all of which strive to create the “healthy” quality that the “Healthy Choice” stamp engenders. This paper proposes to take the “Healthy Choice” stamp as an example to discuss wider issues such as: by looking at the characteristics of this certification network established by The Choices Programme, how are food qualities constructed through processes of qualification (Callon) and how these kind of stamps connect local consumer practices to the global food market.