Last week* we took a tour around France and learned about les gentilés (‘the names of the inhabitants’) of a number of French cities and towns. This week we’ll complete our shopping trip with a look at the new food labeling coming to France en avril (in April).

In order to help les consommateurs (consumers) to make better choices au supermarché (at the supermarket), le Ministère des Affaires sociales et de la Santé (the French health ministry) is introducing le Nutri-Score. This new food labeling system, which ranks prepared foods from vert à l’orange foncé (green to dark orange), is intended to make it plus facile (easier) for shoppers to identify foods that are bon (good) from those that are mauvais (bad).
The new label is optional (facultative) so it’s quite possible that some producteurs (manufactures, producers) may choose not to use it.

You can learn more about le nouveau logo nutritionnel (the new nutritional logo) in the following video. With the vocabulary in this post, you should be able to understand most of the text.

Foods are scored based on how the proportion of how much they include of les « bons » nutriments et les nutriments « négatifs » .

* In last week’s post I referred to the location of some cities and towns by their department and others by region. France is made up of 18 administrative regions (13 in European France and 5 ‘territoires d’outre-mer‘ / ‘overseas territories). Officially established only in 1982, there were originally 27 territories in total. The 22 metropolitan regions were consolidated to their current 13 effective January 1, 2016.   The regions are subdivided into 96 departments. You can find a good description of the regions (the old and the new) here.