Both health and sustainability are stated public policy objectives, but Canada’s food information rules and practices may not be optimal to support their achievement. Lacking a joined up national food policy [2], and thus clear purpose for public information about food, the information presented is frequently left to the marketers of product. No one has responsibility for determining the overall coherence of consumer food messages with these stated policy objectives. Individual firms provide information that shows their products to best advantage. As a result, consumers receive information that is incomplete, and which may contradict the information provided by another firm or government agency. Individual consumers do not have the resources to determine with any ease the accuracy or completeness of any firm’s messages, particularly when faced with the size of food industry advertising budgets. Equally problematic, the national government has recently decided it will “no longer verify nutrition claims on food labels, and will instead set up a website where consumers can take their concerns directly to food producers” [3]. Partly in response to these information and monitoring gaps, for some time now third parties have been filling the consumer food information void, providing endorsements and health and eco-labels that can affect consumer purchasing behaviour.

Government rules confound this problem because there is limited coherence between the parts and levels of government that have responsibility for advertising rules, labelling and grading systems. The healthy eating messages of health departments are often competing with contradictory messages permitted by the regulatory framework of other arms of government. Investments in programs that successfully promote environmental stewardship in agriculture are undercut in the market because consumer information rules do not permit consumers to identify many of these products and support those stewardship efforts with their purchases and eating.

It has been known for some time that diet is a significant risk factor in at least 60% of diseases [4]. Many chronic diseases and conditions, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stress, cancer, diabetes, low birth weight infants (and its associated problems), anaemia, and some infections in children now pose major public health challenges. All of these chronic diseases and conditions are related to nutrition. They affect both the food-rich (those with sufficient income to acquire whatever foods they desire) and the food-poor (those experiencing food insecurity). Very significant percentages of the Canadian population are at risk of these diseases because they do not eat in a manner optimal for health. Of course, healthy eating is a complex undertaking, but information about food is certainly a significant factor.

Canadians collectively pay, through publicly-funded health insurance, for the costs of individuals’ food choices or hunger. The food system has limited responsibility for the social consequences of consumption of its products. The efforts of ministries of health to promote healthy eating are frequently compromised by agribusiness expenditures encouraging unhealthy eating patterns.

Equally, food firms bear little responsibility for the negative environmental impacts of their products. Canada faces significant environmental challenges related to greenhouse gas emissions, energy inefficiencies, nitrogen and phosphorous contamination of waterways, biodiversity losses, and excessive food waste [5,6]. It lags behind most OECD countries in agri-environmental performance [7]. In the industrial world, most of these environmental costs are externalized, absorbed in the environment or remediated by the state, using taxpayer money [8].

Confronted with a myriad of food system problems, governments are failing on many fronts related to health promotion and sustainability, including changing food information rules to enlist eaters in a public effort to create change. This hands-off approach to consumer information is particularly problematic against the backdrop of a growing movement of “citizen-consumers”, eaters who bring a set of values to their shopping and eating decisions that go beyond individual concerns.

Other countries have recognized this problem and taken actions to solve it, Norway and the Netherlands representing two contrasting approaches. In the 1970s, Norway aligned food production and nutrition information with their nutrition policy objectives, to motivate better dietary habits and to develop skills for making more informed food choices. The government recognized that “present marketing practices are in relatively large disaccord with the nutritional objectives. The factors which today regulate sales are only to a small degree dictated by nutritional considerations” [9]. Following a different strategy, because they were unwilling to extensively regulate environmental changes in the agricultural sector, the Dutch government has actively facilitated eco-label programming by NGOs, farm associations and firms to allow consumers to be better informed about the sustainability attributes of food products. Whether this is the most effective approach is subject to some debate [10], but it highlights how environmental information can potentially drive supply chain changes with well designed and profound programming.

The challenge is to redesign consumer information systems so that they help governments achieve their national nutritional, health and environmental objectives for the population. But given shifts underway that reduce state authority over the food system, limited mechanisms of governance, and reduced use of potentially effective policy instruments [11], the limited approaches of earlier periods must be modified. We explore the possibilities for change in this paper, focusing particularly on information conveyed in the supermarket, where most Canadians acquire the bulk of their food for consumption in the home.

According to classical market theory, consumers are presumed to be acting rationally when they make purchases, acting in their self-interest with full awareness. In order to act rationally, they need all the relevant information. Having all the relevant information allows the market to send clear signals to buyers and sellers.

When considering consumer food information needs, regulators have focussed primarily on price, quality and convenience. These parameters have been fairly narrowly defined. For example, food quality has been defined primarily by the safety of the product and, particularly with fresh foods, its cosmetic appearance. Convenience is about the speed and simplicity of preparation.

For their part, the majority of food firms are largely silent on the social, environmental and health impacts of food production, processing and distribution. For example, how a product’s nutritional profile might have been affected by agricultural, storage and distribution practices has not traditionally been seen as relevant to consumers. According to market theory, this absence of full information helps to create a dysfunctional food marketplace in which partial and contradictory signals are sent to both producers and consumers. In turn, these distorted signals mean that resources in the food system are improperly allocated, particularly, those that help to ensure health, environmental sustainability and equitable access.

A traditional positive role of government is to shape, monitor and correct deficiencies in the marketplace. Regulation is one of several tools used by government to carry out this role. In particular, regulation serves to influence the actions of market players, define products and processes, determine what is allowed in the market under what conditions, and provide penalties for non-compliance.

However, policy makers have failed to implement strategies based on how more fully informed consumers can help achieve public policy objectives (e.g., improved health and sustainability). The policy tradition is to manage food supply, rather than actively managing demand [2]. The traditional market view is that prices convey accurate and sufficient information on costs and value that permit consumers to act rationally. In reality, the very conditions required to convey accurate information do not normally exist in modern markets [12]. Economists have long recognized that information asymmetry is a chronic problem in food markets, related to issues of limited competition, the absence of accurate prices and incomplete state regulation. Many have devised theory to explain firm and consumer behaviour in asymmetrical environments. Unfortunately, while this evolving theory explains behaviour, it has not advanced policy changes in Canada that have substantially improved the consumer information environment. While asymmetric information is the norm, the regulatory system does not fully recognize this, neither by regulating to fully correct asymmetry nor by actually normalizing it in regulatory approaches.

As well, this approach to regulation assumes that businesses have no broader social obligations, aside from those related to food safety and product promotion regulations. Yet historically, those obligations arose from public demand for regulation. Health and environmental concerns can be viewed as a contemporary equivalent.

Given this narrow view of business obligations, it is unlikely that many food firms will provide, without state oversight, the information that consumers require to make informed decisions. In 1998 interviews conducted for the TFPC (Toronto Food Policy Council) [1], food marketers stated that they had the interests of consumers at heart. It seems though that most marketers were caught up with achieving sales and brand share targets, keeping within budget and satisfying the demands of more senior management. Most marketers had not spent many hours critically thinking about what it really means to satisfy consumer needs. In fact, many of those interviewed were not familiar at that time with issues of increasing concern to many consumers, including gene manipulation, antibiotic and hormone usage, pesticides, and farm worker rights. It seems, then, that there was a gap between intention and practice. Also, interviewees indicated they were not really willing to pay for consumer education. Particularly with regard to nutritional and environmental concerns, they hoped that the media and government would do most of that work for them.

Ultimately, though, it is the marketers who determine which products consumers have to choose from, and, within existing guidelines, what information about them is conveyed in packaging and labeling. If there is no obvious advantage (as measured through potential increased brand sales and brand market share) to providing the information, then there is no incentive to do something that could ultimately mean increased product costs and lower profits. The degree of incentive changes if a competitor changes tactics and provides different information to consumers. Then a marketer may react to keep the playing field level.

So a contradiction emerges. Business may want informed consumers if it suits their marketing approach, but is not sufficiently informed and motivated to provide them information around broader social objectives. As well, firms have known for some time that consumers are confused about the information provided [1]. But in the absence of clear information, consumers may not be able to articulate what they want. In many cases, not enough consumers are vocalizing concerns in a manner that reaches and resonates with food marketers. Hence, marketers may not react in any significant way with new products or product modifications. All in all, vocalized consumer needs/demands that allow managers to meet product target profit margins with products differentiated from those of the competition drive much of what marketers do regarding the products they market.

There has, however, been an explosion of third party health and environmental organizations involved in consumer information provision, in part because government and business approaches are viewed as inadequate. According to Busch [13]:

From organizations involved in disease prevention, to food production certifiers, these organizations have evolved what are often called private systems of regulation. These organizations are typically non-governmental, or represent associations of businesses. Such approaches allow farmers and firms to create a niche for themselves in food markets, and to ensure the authenticity of their claims, many producers and processors are going to third party certifiers that require changes in production, including low chemical use, the humane treatment of animals, preservation of biodiversity and wildlife, and just labour practices.

Howard and Allen ([14], p. 439) claim that these third party eco-labels serve “three primary functions”:

There are some efforts to reconcile state intervention with these new private regulatory initiatives. Sometimes referred to as regulatory reconfiguration [15], such new governance regimes embrace a wide range of coordinated and integrated instruments (including some traditional command and control regulations), well matched to the desired effect, and implemented by an equally wide range of state and non-state actors to have the best chance of success in the long run. The proposals that follow are rooted in such an approach.

In the Canadian system, responsibilities for consumer information are divided amongst different acts, levels of government, and different units within government departments [16]. The most important pieces of federal legislation are the Food and Drugs Act and Regulations (FDA), and the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act and Regulations (CPLA). Other legislation, including the Canadian Agricultural Products Act (CAPA), the Meat Inspection Act (MIA), the Fish Inspection Act (FIA), are also relevant in some cases. In addition, the federal Broadcasting Act and Regulations have an influence over food commercial messages. This act is the responsibility of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), with regard to the application of regulations and policy rulings. Other pieces of legislation with limited, but sometimes important, bearing on food include the Competition Act and the Trade-marks Act, administered by Industry Canada. In many provinces, there are also provincial rules pertaining to food labeling (e.g., in Ontario, the Farm Products Grades and Sales Act, Regulation 387). The Ontario government is also involved in grading, meat inspection, nutrition and food safety matters. Municipalities in many provinces have some responsibility for implementing provincial legislation regarding nutrition and food safety programs, as they relate to public health, and consequently have some consumer information duties.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Health Canada (HC) share responsibility for regulating food labeling, based on the authorities provided primarily by the Food and Drugs Act (FDA) and Consumer Packaging and Labeling Act (CPLA). Health Canada sets food labeling policies dealing with health and safety matters and CFIA is responsible for non-health and safety food labeling regulations and policies, as well as investigating complaints, encouraging compliance and consumer protection.

Regarding the development of food labeling regulations, the prime concern for CFIA is that no information materials be “false”, “misleading” or “deceptive” as stated in the Canadian Food Labeling Regulations. This situation exists because food safety legislation in Canada has been built on an anti-adulteration platform [17,18].

According to the CFIA, a label “serves three primary functions”: “to provide basic product information”; to provide “health, safety and nutrition information”; and to provide a “vehicle for food marketing, promotion, and advertising” [16]. The policies pertaining to food labeling and packaging, are developed in order to:

Given the complexity of the current system, the jurisdictional divisions, and the gaps in coverage, the question remains whether the current regulatory environment does promote informed food choice, especially with the emergence of a broader range of consumer concerns. We next address this emerging phenomenon of the citizen-consumer.

Historically, attention has focussed on perceived consumer concerns about food price, quality (usually defined by cosmetic appearance), convenience and safety. Now there is increasing evidence that consumer interests are more diverse and complex, challenging the traditional way in which companies have both informed consumers and merchandised food products.

For years, the food industry has publicly explained its behaviour in the marketplace by claiming it was responding to what consumers wanted. Mass produced and inexpensive food, convenience, packaging and extensive product variety have been explained as responses to market signals. Surveys of consumer attitudes have historically reinforced this view [1].

But the consumer marketplace is less homogeneous than earlier times. Consumers have been rebelling against mass produced foods for some time. Smart processors and retailers have diversified their product offerings, in the hope of capturing these new market segments. To do so, they have changed promotional strategies, and have invested in sophisticated market survey instruments. Some consumers, once offered new kinds of choices, have responded and changed their purchasing patterns. All these developments confirm the interactive and dynamic interconnections between product availability, consumer information and desires. It is increasingly clear that consumer demand is a product of individual and collective wants and needs, access and availability, and the type and manner of information provided.

Welsh and MacRae [19] suggested that if the population is to be engaged in food buying that supports sustainability and food security, and not just traditional conceptions of price, quality, convenience and safety, then the concept of ‘consumer’ is far too limited because it focuses primarily on the ability to buy (or reject) products and services. In contrast, the language of ‘citizen’ implies membership in a society, with both rights and responsibilities beyond those of consuming goods and services. Similarly, society is more than simply a marketplace.

It may now be that many consumers are moving into what Gabriel and Lang [20] have called the fourth wave of consumer activism. In their analysis, they separate the emergence of consumer movements into four waves. The first wave of co-operative consumers was sparked by the Co-operative Movement, which began in England in 1844 and which was based on the principle of self-help by the people without any distinctions between consumers and producers ([20], p. 41). The second wave consists of the ‘value for money’ movement, which came into its own during the 1930s in the United States ([20], p. 44). Consumer activists in the second wave were concerned about “the threat posed to consumers by increasing concentration and monopoly capital” and their aim was to “make the marketplace more efficient and to champion the interests of the consumer within it” through education and advocacy efforts ([20], pp. 44–45). The third wave, Naderism, also emerged in the United States. This movement originated with the publication of American lawyer, author and activist Ralph Nader’s 1965 exposé of the American car industry, Unsafe at Any Speed. Gabriel and Lang argue that Naderism “brought a new punch to consumer politics” by tapping “a deep well of public unease about the power of large corporations vis-à-vis the individual customer” ([20], p. 47). Naderism places a lot of emphasis on debunking misinformation from large corporations and demanding that the state protect its citizens. The fourth wave of consumer activism consists of what Gabriel and Lang [20] term alternative consumerism, what others have called ethical consumerism [21] and what Micheletti [22] refers to as political consumerism. Political consumerism emerged in the 1970s and gained coherence as a movement in the 1990s [20]. The emergence of political consumerism coincides with the rise of the environmental movement in North America and Europe and one of the first streams of alternative consumerism was the green consumer movement which advocated for reduced consumption and/or the consumption of products that were more environmentally friendly. Gabriel and Lang [20] note that by the early twenty-first century, the green consumer movement had gone mainstream, and the reformist stream of green consumerism (which advocated consuming not less, but differently) had spawned a whole new category of green products and businesses.

A prominent feature of this fourth wave is what Micheletti [22] calls buycotting, a form of ‘positive political consumerism’ that involves buying particular goods and brand names over others based on claims made about the product. Buycotting is in contrast to ‘negative political consumerism’, or boycotting, which involves refusing to buy specific products or brand names. Buycotting is generally dependent on labeling schemes set up by governmental or extra-governmental regulating bodies. Labeling schemes are important because they legitimize and govern the claims made about products marketed to political consumers. For consumers interested in the politics of products, labeling schemes help them to identify products that are (or at least claim to be) in line with their political values and concerns.

Out of these dynamics emerges the concept of the citizen-consumer [22,23,24], those actors who “combine the public role of citizens with the private role of consumers” ([22], p. 16). Unlike consumers whose motivations are based on purely private concerns, citizen-consumers are motivated (at least in part) by public concerns related to their identity as citizens.

Arguments regarding the effectiveness and viability of political consumerism are generally based on the concept of consumer sovereignty, which Dixon and Carsky define as “the power of consumers to determine, from among the offerings of producers of goods and services, what goods and services are and will be offered (produced) and/or created in the economic sphere of society” ([25], p. 29). Although the concept of consumer sovereignty is not new, dating back at least as far as Adam Smith, contemporary forms of ‘voting with your dollar’ rose to prominence in the late twentieth century alongside neo-liberal governance models that “actively promoted the idea of consumer choice in the market as a worthy complement to, and even substitute for the citizenship ideal of democratic participation” ([23], p. 246). Although contentious and with only piecemeal empirical data on the effectiveness of political consumerism [26], some of the contemporary advocates of political consumerism borrow from the logic of trickle-down economics [27] to argue that, in theory, the more people shop for products labeled as more ecologically friendly or socially just, the greater will be the market share of these products, and in turn, the more these products will be available and affordable to the general population [28].

However, Jacobsen and Dulsrud [29] found that consumers do not often have enough information about the politics beyond products to make informed political consumerist choices. This is the jumping off point for the rest of our analysis. How must consumer food information systems be redesigned to leverage the citizen-consumer phenomenon and advance government objectives around health and sustainability? Given that health and sustainability are collective good objectives, we follow Johnston’s interpretation that draws a clear distinction between consumerism’s “maximization of individual self-interest through commodity choice,” and citizenship based on the prioritization of “the collective good,” which “emphasizes responsibility to ensure the survival and wellbeing of others—human and non-human” ([29], p. 243). This is an important distinction because a significant assumption of the current system is that individual self-optimization generates wider societal value. While some actions may benefit both the individual and society [30], the view expressed here is that the state must facilitate collective good undertakings and must shape how individuals behave to achieve public objectives. Individual self-optimization is not sufficient to create the necessary aggregate effects. This is admittedly a challenging proposition for the state because the industrial and neo-liberal values that currently dominate food production and manufacturing have for some time been supported by state legislation, regulation and programming [31,32]. We highlight below certain health and environmental aspects of the consumer information system that could be modified in the current environment to allow this wider citizen-consumer notion of choice and societal value to be expressed.

A caveat—we recognize that improving information is only one of many changes to create a more sustainable and health promoting food system. Ultimately, our proposals will only be truly effective when integrated with other measures, as elaborated in a joined up food policy approach by MacRae [2]. Consistent with a joined up approach, we focus later on integrated solutions.

Health and sustainability are public policy objectives, but Canada’s food information rules and practices may not be optimal to support their achievement because the information provided is frequently determined by the marketers of product in a semi-regulated environment. No institution or agency has responsibility for determining the overall coherence of consumer food messages relative to these broader social goals of health and sustainability. Individual consumers do not have the resources to determine easily the completeness of any firm’s messages, particularly when faced with the size of food industry advertising budgets. The healthy eating messages of health departments are often competing with contradictory or incomplete messages permitted by the regulatory framework of other arms of government. Investments in programs that successfully promote environmental stewardship in agriculture are undercut in the market because consumers often have too little information to support those efforts with their dollars. This problem exists despite the emergence of “citizen-consumers” who have a broader approach to food purchasing than solely individual maximization. Only recently have some health professionals and sustainable agriculture proponents turned their attention to all these factors and begun to design interventions that take them into account. Significant short, medium and long term regulatory changes are required to facilitate the citizen-consumer phenomenon and better support consumers in their efforts to promote health and sustainability in the Canadian food system.