For many producers of food for vegans and vegetarians it is a real victory. A ruling by the EU Court of Justice has in fact established that “if a legal name has not been adopted, a Member State cannot prohibit the use of terms traditionally associated with products of animal origin to designate a product containing vegetable proteins”. But to better understand what the Luxembourg judges indicated, it is appropriate to take a step back.
The appeal of the French associations against the Paris decision
The ruling arises from an appeal presented by four French associations active in the vegan and vegetarian products market against a decree approved by the government. The text established a prohibition on indicating products made with vegetable proteins with names such as “steak” or “sausage” without appropriate additional clarification. In essence, the name “soy sausage” or “seitan steak” in the case of vegetable products had to be indicated on the labels, to give two simple examples.
At this point the associations asked the French Council of State to cancel the decree. The transalpine judges therefore turned to the European Court of Justice for the correct interpretation of the contested text. And today, Friday 4 October, the decision of the Luxembourg magistrates arrived. According to the ruling, the information that producers are required to provide already sufficiently protects European consumers “even in the event of total substitution of only the component or ingredient that the latter can expect to find in a designated food”.
Member states can provide themselves with a “legal definition” to establish the exact composition of foods, but in the absence of the latter, they cannot oblige producers of vegetable proteins “through the use of usual names or descriptive names, to indicate the name of such foods”.
Translated: until it is established exactly in legal terms what is a “sausage” and what is a “steak”, producers cannot be forced to specify that a steak is made of meat or soy. However, the game is not over. The ball now passes to the judges of the national states who, when applying the law, will also have to take into account the EU ruling.