Sir; It is a pity the Harris research commissioned by The Grocer ('GDAs are ahead in race to appeal', 28 October, p7) did not appear to test how the different front-of-pack labelling schemes perform in enabling consumers to make healthier choices.

The key research objective should be not to establish marginal differences in what people think would be useful, but to determine what works best to bring about real, healthy change.

The best evidence we have to date is research conducted by the FSA that differentiated between consumer preferences plus claimed behaviour change on the one hand, and real behaviour change on the other. Critically, what the FSA research showed is that traffic light labels performed better at a glance in enabling consumers from all social groups to discriminate between high, medium and low levels of nutrients..

It is frustrating that the development of a universal nutritional labelling approach is being dumbed down to a beauty contest between traffic lights and GDAs. This is a disservice to consumers.