A new Canadian ecolabel launched earlier this month that promotes winter wheat as a bird-friendly crop from the Canadian prairies. Winter wheat is planted in the fall and starts growing as soon as the weather allows in the spring, providing critical habitat for returning migratory waterfowl. This new ecolabel is a partnership between Cereals Canada and Ducks Unlimited Canada, but it isn’t the first agriculture ecolabel, or even bird-friendly ecolabel, on the market. From Smithsonian Bird Friendly coffee to Canada Organic produce, it may seem like there is an ecolabel for nearly every food product on grocery store shelves. For example, OpenThinker Jee In Kim recently wrote about raised without antibiotics (RWA) meat. Plus there are ecolabels for appliances, cleaning products and cosmetics, and tourism destinations among many other consumer goods and experiences.
According to Ecolabel Index, an online directory of ecolabels, there are 112 ecolabels in use in Canada and 455 ecolabels in use around the globe. Ecolabels are meant to provide consumers with the assurance that a product is sustainable, but what does this information-rich environment really mean for consumers?
When it comes to seafood, confusion may be a barrier to the success of eco-certification. In my last blog post I identified different types of ecolabels including eco-certification, recommendation, and organic labels. There are also labels for seafood quality and origin, fair trade status, animal welfare, and food safety. This noisy labelling environment can lead to confusion for consumers. A recent Canadian study of consumer awareness of ecolabels revealed that even when consumers recognize a seafood ecolabel, they often don’t understand what it means.
So why do we still see so many types of ecolabels if the vast number of labels causes confusion? That confusion doesn’t necessarily stop consumers from preferring and purchasing ecolabelled products. For farmed seafood, there is evidence that consumers prefer and are willing to pay more for products that bear an ecolabel – but factors including price, place of origin, species, and preference for wild-harvested seafood over farmed-raised seafood may be just as, or even more important to consumers when they make decisions about what seafood to buy.
If you look for ecolabels when you purchase food and goods, you are not alone. The number of ecolabels on the market might cause confusion, but it is also providing consumers with options to help them select products based on what is ethically and practically important to them. Whatever sustainability issues are important to you, there is probably an ecolabel to help support your purchasing decision – but you may need to do a little homework to make sure the ecolabels you rely on are credible and verified.
