EU consumers could face an annual bill of €1.1bn when new EU country-of-origin labelling rules on meat come in next year, a new report has warned.

Current EU labelling rules require pre-packed meat, with the exception of beef, to carry very little detailed origin information.

Under the new legislation, which is due to come into force on 13 December 2014, pre-packed unprocessed pig, poultry, sheep and goat meat will have to carry far more information.

Of the three options assessed in the report, adding place of birth, rearing and slaughter on-pack was deemed to be most costly at an estimated €2 a year on top of every consumer’s existing meat spend, or €1.1bn in total.

“The analysis indicates that the mandatory nature of the origin labelling will mean that most of the extra costs will be passed on to consumers with a smaller proportion passed back to producers,” said Wageningen University, which coordinated the study.

Consumers’ willingness to pay for additional origin information was low, it added.

The second most costly option would be labelling with country of rearing and slaughter, which would result in an additional €810m annual cost to consumers, it said.

The third option - labelling meat ‘EU’ or ‘Non-EU’ - was likely to have a negligible impact because it was already relatively easy for EU and non-EU meat to be identified in the supply chain. It would also only require “a little bit of ink to write the country of origin on the label”, said Willy Baltussen, senior project leader at Wageningen.

The greatest impact was likely to be in pork, because the greater level of trade compared with other proteins would require greater changes to present labelling, said Baltussen.

The costliest option was actually the most popular with consumers because it offered “maximum transparency,” the report said.

The EU stressed that the report was taken into account as “one contribution” amongst others, in its assessment of the available meat labelling options.

“The draft proposal is still being discussed by the Commission and member states it is not at its final stage yet and we thus cannot be any more specific at this stage,” said an EC spokeswoman.

Baltussen emphasised that whichever option was chosen, the burden was likely to be greatest for medium-sized companies. Larger companies had the scale to deal with additional origin labelling requirements and smaller companies were likely to source meat more closely to them, meaning labelling was relatively simple. Medium companies, however, were “often stuck in the middle,” he said.

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