Status and Consumer′s Knowledge of Nutritional Labelling of Food in Market in Chengdu

Objective To investigate the status of nutritional labelling of common food and consumer's knowledge of nutritional labelling in Chengdu. Method The status of nutritional labelling of 291 kinds of food packages from 10 categories in seven large supermarkets were investigated, and 366 consumers were randomly selected and interviewed with a questionnaire. The data were analyzed in SPSS13.0. Results The overall labelling rate of food nutrition was 47.1%, and a lot of food(42.3%) only marked ≤3 kinds of nutrition. There was a comparatively great difference on nutritional labelling rate among different kinds of foods, and names and units of nutrients labelled were not uniform. 62.4% consumers would purchase the foods with the nutritional labelling, and 85.2 % consumers argued that the government should take measures to uniform nutritional information printed on food packages. Conclusion The current food labelling in the supermarket is not normative, and the government should take steps in the legislation of food nutritional labelling. The knowledge of consumers to food nutritional labelling is poor, and the government and media should enhance relative propaganda and education to consumers.