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The A-to-E food label now on Dutch supermarket shelves — what it actually measures, and where it lies to you
Part of: Healthcare, Albert Heijn
Nutri-Score is the coloured A-to-E label increasingly stamped on Dutch supermarket products and shelf tags: dark green A for the most nutritionally favourable, dark orange-red E for the least. It scores a product's overall nutritional profile — penalising calories, sugar, saturated fat, and salt; rewarding protein, fibre, fruit, vegetables, and legumes — and reduces that to a single letter so you can compare two products at a glance without reading the full nutrition panel.
Nutri-Score isn't Dutch — it originated in France. The Netherlands piloted it starting around 2019, with Hak and Iglo among the first Dutch producers to adopt it voluntarily on their own products. At that point the Dutch food industry federation FNLI was holding back, waiting for government research, and consumer group Consumentenbond was actively warning against a fragmented landscape of competing logos (checkmarks, traffic-light labels, Nutri-Score all at once) confusing shoppers more than helping them. (NOS, 4 September 2019)
Albert Heijn adopted Nutri-Score early, rolling it out across roughly 6,000 of its own-brand products from 2022. The Dutch government made Nutri-Score the official — but still voluntary — national food-choice logo from 1 January 2024, after RIVM and the Health Council reviewed the underlying science.
The most consumer-visible recent step: in March 2025, Albert Heijn started showing Nutri-Score on the electronic shelf tags for all products in store — including other manufacturers' "A-brands," some of which reportedly did not want their score displayed. Because Nutri-Score is voluntary for the manufacturer but AH controls its own shelf-edge labels, the supermarket can effectively publish a score a brand never opted into. (NL Times / Nieuwe Oogst, March 2025)
If a manufacturer chooses to use Nutri-Score at all, Dutch rules require them to apply it across their entire product range under that brand — not just the healthier items. The point is to stop a company slapping a green A on its granola while quietly leaving a chocolate bar under the same brand unlabelled. Brands register with France's Santé Publique France (which coordinates the scheme across participating countries) and submit product data to the Netherlands' Nutrition Centre (Voedingscentrum) database; if they stop maintaining that data within 24 months, the certification lapses. (Rijksoverheid: Nutri-Score voor bedrijven)
Before the government adopted Nutri-Score, the Gezondheidsraad (Health Council of the Netherlands) evaluated the algorithm and gave it a qualified yes, not a clean bill of health. Their 2022 review found the system genuinely useful for flagging clearly unhealthy products (the yellow/orange/red C–D–E range), but flagged real weaknesses:
The Council's stance was that these were fixable flaws in a useful tool, not reasons to reject it — and recommended ongoing monitoring of how it actually changes consumer and manufacturer behaviour, not just how it scores on paper. (Health Council of the Netherlands, 29 November 2022)
There's early evidence it does. A 2024 study in Nutrients tracked food composition across five European countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy, UK) from 2019–2021 for bread, breakfast cereals, hot sauces, and processed potato products, and found measurable reformulation: salt reduced by 0.1–1.2 g/100g in some categories, sugar reduced by up to roughly 2 g/100g in others — nudging products toward better Nutri-Score letters. The authors' conclusion was cautious: manufacturers appear to reformulate partly in anticipation of Nutri-Score, but recommended monitoring after full implementation to confirm the effect holds. (Egnell et al., Nutrients 2024, 16(23), 4184)
It's worth putting Nutri-Score next to the food-politics movement that erupted in the US around the same period, because the two illustrate very different theories of how to fix a food supply people don't trust. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became US Health and Human Services Secretary in February 2025 and launched "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) as a national platform in early 2026, targeting synthetic food dyes, industrial seed oils, and ultra-processed foods generally — explicitly citing EU-style warning labels as a model to aim for. On paper, that sounds close to Nutri-Score. In practice, the two approaches diverge sharply.
Process: Nutri-Score is the output of a slow, technocratic, multi-country scientific process — RIVM and the Dutch Health Council publicly evaluated and criticised the algorithm's specific weaknesses (see above) before the Netherlands adopted it, and it's coordinated across several EU countries through Santé Publique France. MAHA, by contrast, has moved largely through public pressure, rally rhetoric, and executive-branch influence rather than legislation or binding regulation: as of August 2026, there are still zero enacted FDA bans on synthetic dyes or seed oils. What exists instead is a voluntary pledge from twelve major food manufacturers to remove synthetic dyes by 2028, and a proposed three-tier green/yellow/red front-of-pack label for ultra-processed foods that, unlike Nutri-Score's nutrient-based algorithm, doesn't yet have a finalised scoring methodology. (FoodNavigator, 3 March 2026)
Evidence base: Nutri-Score's flaws are debated in public health journals and government evaluation documents that name the specific problem (pasta differentiation, oil scoring) and propose fixes. MAHA has faced the opposite kind of scrutiny: an AP News investigation identified over a dozen instances where studies cited in MAHA's own reports were mischaracterised, drawn from non-peer-reviewed preprints, or simply didn't exist, and multiple academic groups have published counter-analyses challenging its methodology. That doesn't mean every MAHA concern is unfounded — added sugar, ultra-processed food, and opaque additive approval (Kennedy's critique of the US "GRAS" — Generally Recognized As Safe — self-certification loophole is a real regulatory gap) are legitimate issues nutrition scientists in Europe also worry about. But the two movements sit at very different points on the evidence-to-advocacy spectrum.
What this says about each system: Nutri-Score reflects a European instinct toward incremental, negotiated, publicly-documented regulation — arguably slower and less satisfying, but built to survive scrutiny and be quietly revised. MAHA reflects an American instinct toward a charismatic reform movement moving faster than the institutional evidence base underneath it, betting that public pressure and market response (consumer label-reading reportedly rose sharply amid the MAHA news cycle) will outpace the years a European-style technocratic process would take. Whether that produces durable change or a wave of unenforceable pledges is, as of 2026, still an open question on the American side — while Nutri-Score, whatever its flaws, is now a fairly settled part of the Dutch shelf.
Nutri-Score is a genuinely useful shortcut, but Dutch supermarket marketing has plenty of tactics that sit underneath it or around it entirely:
Nutri-Score is a rare case of a genuinely EU-coordinated consumer-facing system landing visibly in Dutch daily life — you'll see the coloured letters on Albert Heijn shelf tags and packaging within your first few grocery runs. It's worth understanding both what it's good at (fast, rough comparison between similar products) and where it stops being useful (it says nothing about processing level, additives beyond the scored nutrients, or marketing claims printed elsewhere on the pack). Used as a first filter rather than a final verdict, it's one of the more practically useful pieces of Dutch/EU food policy a newcomer will interact with daily.
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