Following the official launch of the U-label platform on 1st December 2021, spiritsEUROPE has been blessed with a wave of positive feedback on the initiative and requests to join the platform. Companies across Europe have signed up to the platform and are creating their product-specific QR-codes with relevant consumer information, covering energy information, lists of ingredients, responsible drinking messages and other sustainability information.
Users of U-label have reported that the benefits of digital consumer information include the following: spirit drinks producers can provide consumers with key information right at their fingertips in their own language across the EU, companies can actively prevent wastage occurring from the slightest label changes (on average 40-50m of waste between different label variations on the same machine), companies –especially SMEs – can maintain Diversity in the Spirits Sector as e-labels give mechanism for producers to provide all the necessary information for consumers in each market without having market specific labels. This is especially relevant for small producers who often cannot afford to do market-specific labels for every market or Travel Retail operators. Without e-labels there would be a much more homogenous range of products in stores, especially products created by SMEs would be severely limited as these small companies can often not afford localised labels. E-labels therefore widen consumer choice and provide market access to SMEs.
To facilitate the use of the U-Label platform, spiritsEUROPE launched a series of monthly U-label interaction points. These sector led sessions are designed to facilitate the peer-to-peer exchanges which allow for a cross-sector, cross-category shared learning experience – which leads to more confident users of the U-label platform across the EU. With close to 100 company representatives attending the first meeting of the newly launched series, the spiritsEUROPE secretariat is looking forward to organising the second U-label Interaction point at the end of February (date tbc). Seeing the sector getting together and pushing online consumer information to the next level is the essence of conviviality and a vivid example of successful co-regulation led by industry.
U-label.com
