Total Quality Indicators for the Food Production Chain: is there a need for more labelling?

The state of the farming industry in Europe has been put under the spotlight in recent years due to a number of different food scares and disease outbreaks. Many new quality assurance schemes have been formed to accompany the existing environmental monitoring schemes, to give concerned consumers some guarantee when buying food that it is of a good quality and the environmental load of production has been considered. The need for all these different labels needs to be questioned. Are they informing the consumer or confusing them? The question asked in this desk-based study was: is there a need for a scheme to promote the total quality of a food product? The situation in Sweden was used as an example with the various labelling initiatives and indicator schemes already in place being assessed. The research produced a positive answer to the question. It was found that there is a need/demand for an indicator system that covers the entire food production system and can install consumer confidence in the project. It was suggested that this could be in the form of a product declaration that covered production the whole way, from the farm gate to our dinner plate.