EU PARLIAMENT BACKS BAN ON ‘BURGER’, ‘STEAK’ LABELS FOR PLANT-BASED FOODS

Tue 14 October 2025:

The European Parliament voted Wednesday to ban the use of meat-related terms including “burger” and “steak” to market plant-based foods, in a win for disgruntled farmers.

EU lawmakers approved the legal proposal with 355 votes in favour and 247 against during a plenary session in Strasbourg. The text still needs to be negotiated with the bloc’s 27 member states before it can become law.

The plant-based food industry has grown exponentially in recent years, with more people opting for a meat-free lifestyle.

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“Let’s call a spade a spade,” Celine Imart, the French member of the parliament who led the initiative was quoted by AFP news agency as saying about plant-based products.

Marketing plant-based products using meat labels “is misleading for the consumer”, the member of the conservative EPP group in the EP said.

Under the proposal, other labels like, “egg yolk”, “egg white” and “escalope” would be restricted to products that contain meat.

The EU has already defined dairy items as products coming from the “normal mammary secretion”. This includes products like milk, yogurt and cheese.

Oat milk, for instance, is called an oat drink on European shelves.

Greens and liberal lawmakers have criticised the now-approved EP text as “useless”.

“While the world is burning, the EPP has nothing better to do this week than to involve us all in a debate about sausages and schnitzel,” Anna Cavazzini of Germany’s Green Party was quoted by Deutsche Welle as saying.

Environmentalists have said that the ban would be a setback for sustainability.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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