The Future of Food Labelling: Navigating Data, Regulation and Consumer Trust

Labels are changing faster than most food companies realise. What used to be a simple shelf-side signal is becoming something far more structural: a data layer that regulators, retailers, digital platforms and consumers all use to classify, compare and act on food information.

This shift is the subject of a new white paper, The Future of Food Labelling: Navigating Data, Regulation and Consumer Trust, produced by the EDHEC Centre for Net Positive Business with Roquette, as part of the Accessible Healthy Nutrition programme. The programme brings together actors across the agri-agro value chain to co-create solutions for a more sustainable and inclusive food system, with the ambition of making healthy nutrition accessible at scale.

From on-pack information to machine-readable infrastructure

Before an app can score a product, before a retailer can filter it, and before an AI assistant can recommend or reject it, the product needs to exist as structured, comparable information. Open databases already host data feeding directly into public policy tools and industrial standards are reinforcing this shift too.
For food companies, this means product data quality is no longer a back-office concern, it is a strategic capability. Weak data can mean weak visibility: a product may be misread, misclassified or filtered out before the consumer ever sees it.

Scenarios built to prepare, not predict

The white paper combines regulatory analysis across five European markets — the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium — with academic research and perspectives gathered from industry. It builds on the scenario-planning methodology developed by HORIZONS, the food foresight platform powered by Roquette, which scans signals of change, prioritizes them by impact, and constructs scenarios exploring how the future may unfold under different conditions.

Because foresight isn't about predicting one future — it's about mapping the ones that matter, so food companies can act with clarity today.