Private Versus Third Party versus Government Labeling

This article focuses on understanding the relative merits of private, third party, and government labeling systems that differ in who sets the standards and who certifies that the product deserves to carry the label. It focuses briefly on economic and marketing tools for understanding relationships between information, product quality, and labeling. It then turns to incentives and rationales for labeling to be private, third party, or government-based and considerations for evaluating the performance of labeling systems. This article presents a survey of the evidence to date on the performance impacts of different labeling schemes and summarizes key insights from impact of labeling that are relevant to the comparison of different types of food labeling. It concludes with a discussion of key issues for the future of food labeling, food labeling policy, and performance and mentions that the major issue for the future is how well and reliably different labeling schemes will deliver information on verified quality.