While sipping vodka sodas at a downtown bar in New York’s East Village roughly a year ago, a friend told me he prefers the beverage because it had “no calories.”
That’s wrong. Vodka, distilled from grains or potatoes, always contains calories. And making matters worse is the fact that the beverage my friend was drinking was a vanilla vodka, leading me to the next unpalatable fact: Flavored spirits pack even more calories than their unflavored sibling brands.
Diageo, the world’s largest liquor company, has led the charge to change misconceptions about what exactly can be found in alcoholic beverages.
Look at the label of an alcoholic beverage sold on liquor shelves today and you’ll see information about the beverage you are consuming is fairly limited. The U.S. Treasury’s Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) allows labels to announce the classification of the beverage (gin, vodka, etc.), as well as the alcohol content, the brand name and a health warning statement. There isn’t much more information beyond that, and certainly no details about what’s in the liquid.
Diageo last week announced it will begin adding nutritional information — including protein, fats, calories, and carbohydrates — to labels in the U.S., following the TTB’s approval in May 2013 that the serving facts could be included, after previously not allowing alcohol companies permission to do so. Diageo, which has fought for such approval for more than a decade, said it can list information in ideal “standard sizes,” meaning it can print labels on spirits for a 1.5 fluid ounce size, comparable to a 5-fluid ounce serving of wine and a 12-fluid ounce serving for beer.
Diageo has been more vocal than most about giving more information about the nutritional content of alcoholic beverages. The company has run a website called DRINKIQ since 2006 to give consumers more information. The company plans to make changes to the labels in the coming months as brands change or update their labels. It is an arduous process, as the TTB must sign off on each individual label, for each bottle size and every single different flavor that Diageo sells.
The U.K. Company wants to take this initiative global. It has aspirations to provide nutritional details to all nations it serves, though so far outside the U.S., the company can only provide limited information about alcohol content in a few markets like Australia, Thailand and Great Britain.
There’s also a broader industry effort to change labeling standards in Europe. The Brewers of Europe, a trade organization that represents more than 5,000 breweries across the continent, on Thursday announced brewers would commit to voluntarily listing ingredients and nutritional information on their brands.
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“We want Europe’s consumers to know the ingredients in beer and how these beers can fit within a balanced lifestyle,” said Pierre-Olivier Bergeron, secretary general of The Brewers of Europe. Major brewers, including Anheuser-Busch InBev, Heineken, SABMiller and Carlsberg were among those that endorsed the proposal, although it will likely take some time before labels will feature such information as it is a costly endeavor for such big brands to change the labels on their packaging.
In Europe, while Diageo supports the move to add nutritional information on labels, it contends that the 100 milliliters of liquid basis “does not reflect the reality of the way drinkers consume alcohol, and is therefore misleading.” For example, the 100 milliliters basis in Europe is a third of a typical beer serving, two-thirds a typical glass of wine and three times more than a serving of a spirit. The company is fighting for more typical serving size details to spare drinkers from doing complicated math in their heads.
“To this end, Diageo will work with the EU to establish a standard alcohol unit across the 28 Member States to provide an effective way of communicating alcohol content to consumers,” Diageo said.
Graphic by Analee Kasudia