If it has not adopted a legal name , a State “may not prohibit the use of terms traditionally associated with products of animal origin to designate a product containing vegetable proteins”.
And so no to the general ban on writing “soy steak” on plant-based products.
The Court of Justice of the EU has intervened on the subject of food labelling, explaining that "the express harmonisation provided for by Union law prevents a Member State from issuing a national provision establishing vegetable protein levels below which the use of names, other than legal names, consisting of terms from the butchery and delicatessen sectors to describe, market or promote foods containing vegetable proteins would remain authorised" .
Vegan food, the French case
The case comes from France. Here, a series of entities active in the vegetarian and vegan products sector, which promote vegetarianism or produce and market products based on vegetable proteins (L'Association Protéines France, l'Union vegetarienne européenne (EVU), l'Association végétérienne de France (AVF) and the company Beyond Meat Inc.) are contesting a decree adopted by the French government in order to protect the transparency of information relating to food in trade.
According to the acronyms, the decree , which prohibits the use of names such as "steak" or "sausage" to designate processed products containing vegetable proteins, without or even with the addition of complementary specifications such as "vegetable" or "soya" , violates Regulation (EU) No. 1169/2011.
The matter reached the French Council of State, which was asked to annul the decree, and then the European Court, to which the judge referred several preliminary questions relating to the interpretation of the regulation.
Food labelling, the ruling
In its judgment, the Court establishes that “EU law establishes a rebuttable presumption according to which the information provided in the manner prescribed by Regulation No 1169/2011 sufficiently protects consumers, even in the case of total substitution of only the component or ingredient that the latter can expect to find in a food designated by a usual name or by a descriptive name containing certain terms.
It specifies that a Member State can certainly adopt a legal name , which consists in associating a specific expression with a given food.
Indeed, only this last measure allows to guarantee the protection of the consumer, who must be able to start from the principle that a food designated by a given legal name satisfies the conditions specifically provided for the use of the latter”.
“Where a Member State has not adopted a legal name, it cannot, by means of a general and abstract prohibition, prevent producers of foods based on vegetable proteins from fulfilling, by using customary names or descriptive names, the obligation to indicate the name of those foods .
Furthermore, the Court states that "the preliminary ruling allows the judges of the Member States, in the context of a dispute before them, to ask the Court of Justice to interpret Union law or to determine the validity of a Union act.
The Court does not resolve the national dispute . It is for the national court to resolve the case in accordance with the decision of the Court. That decision is equally binding on other national courts to which a similar problem is submitted."
Therefore, the Italian ban on meat sounding adopted through the Law that blocks the production and marketing of meat grown in the country is contrary to European law.
Article 3 of the Italian law, in fact, prohibits the use of "usual and descriptive [...] denominations, referring to meat". (Source: https://www.helpconsumatori.it/ )