Consumer rights are bottomless when it comes to the changes needed. Producers care about them in different ways. one of which are sales of products of different composition and quality under the same name and in the same packaging.
The sale of products of different quality under the same brand to different countries is a common practice of food producers, with quality being significantly lower for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, such as Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Croatia and Romania.
This was confirmed by numerous studies as well as by the investigation which commissioned the governments of Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. It has shown that products less rich in nutrients and valuables, such as meat and fish, go to their countries.
It is also common that the amount of a given ingredient agrees, but its quality is already much lower. Moreover, e.g. children's food jars, purchased in identical packaging in Croatia and Germany, despite the lower quality of those supplied to first from these countries, they are much more expensive than the German ones.
Manufacturers fail to explain this type of practice by adapting their products to individual tastes of customers from different countries.
The new EU legislation is intended to prohibit companies from selling the same product in different packagings. An additional obligation will be to mark the goods clearly to the buyer who is to have access to the information about the ingredients immediately at the time of purchase.
The new law was voted in the EP Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) committee. Now the fate of the rules will be decided by the Council, the Member States. If it is implemented in Poland, it can help to clear the Polish landscape from “chemical stores from Germany” which actually sell better quality products.
Author:
Katarzyna Kołbuś - Editor leading RB Magazine. From Over 10 years related to industry press, including the Financial Gazette and portal ipip.com.pl, which is devoted to finance, taxation, law, politics and the economy. She graduated from Polish philology at the UMCS and the language editing of the text at the University of Warsaw.