Directive (EU) 2024/825 applies from 27 September 2026, but several Member States, Spain among them, had not transposed it by the deadline. The usual reading is that its prohibitions cannot yet be relied on against operators. For food, that reading overlooks a regulation that has been directly applicable since 2011.
What the Directive prohibits, and where transposition stands
Directive (EU) 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition amends Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices and applies from 27 September 2026. For food labelling, its core consists of four prohibited practices. Three are prohibited in all circumstances: making a generic environmental claim where recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim cannot be demonstrated (point 4a of Annex I); presenting a claim that concerns only one aspect as relating to the entire product (point 4b); and claiming, based on greenhouse gas emissions offsetting, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment (point 4c). To these is added a prohibition of general scope with particular resonance in food: presenting requirements imposed by law on all products in the category as a distinctive feature of the trader's offer (point 10a).
The Directive defines a generic environmental claim as one that is not included in a sustainability label and whose specification is not provided in clear and prominent terms on the same medium. The practical consequence is that the prohibition bites on the lack of specification, not on the words used. “Sustainable packaging” is generic; “packaging made from 80% recycled plastic”, with that specification next to the claim, is not. This is how the questions and answers published by the Commission in June 2026 put it, adding two points relevant to the sector. First, there is no transitional regime for existing stocks, so from that date environmental information must also be compliant on products already manufactured. Second, the prohibition in point 4c does not extend to claims based on the actual footprint of the product itself, nor to climate contributions communicated at company level, which remain subject to the general clauses.
Transposition adds a complication. Member States had to adopt their transposing measures by 27 March 2026, and on 28 May 2026 the Commission sent letters of formal notice to twenty Member States, Spain among them, for failing to do so. In Spain, the transposing instrument is the draft Sustainable Consumption Act, which amends the Unfair Competition Act (Law 3/1991) and sets 27 September 2026 as the entry into force of those amendments — a date that will only be operative if the law is published before then. At the time of writing, the draft was still awaiting approval as a bill by the Council of Ministers and submission to Parliament. Meanwhile, the proposal for a Green Claims Directive, which would have required prior, third-party-verified substantiation, has been stalled since the Commission announced in June 2025 its intention to withdraw it.
The usual reading of this situation is that, until national law is published, the new prohibitions have no effect against operators. For most sectors that reading is substantially correct. For food, it is considerably less so — and the reasoning that follows holds in any Member State where transposition is late.
The environmental claim as food information: Regulation 1169/2011 and Directive 2024/825 together
When a business makes an environmental claim that refers specifically to the food itself — not to the characteristics of its packaging or to the company's green credentials — it is not only a commercial practice. It is also food information within the meaning of Article 2(2)(a) of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, and voluntary information at that, since the Directive defines an environmental claim as a non-mandatory message. This is the case with claims about the method of production (“grown with renewable energy”, “produced with less water”). As such, it is subject to Article 7(1)(a), which prohibits information that misleads as to the characteristics of the food and, in particular, its “method of manufacture or production”, and to Article 36(2), which requires voluntary information not to mislead, not to be ambiguous or confusing, and to be based, where appropriate, on the relevant scientific data. Treating the environmental impact of the process as part of the method of production is an interpretative step, but one consistent with Article 3(1) of the same Regulation. Claims about the packaging fall outside this regime, except where the presentation projects onto the food an environmental attribute that belongs only to the packaging (Article 7(4)(b)).
That the environmental dimension belongs to this regime is not a new construction. Since 2011, Article 3(1) of Regulation 1169/2011 has provided that food information must enable consumers to make informed choices “taking into particular account health, economic, environmental, social and ethical considerations”. The Court of Justice has used that provision to determine which information is relevant to the purchasing decision and, therefore, when its omission or wording may mislead: in Psagot (C-363/18, judgment of 12 November 2019, paragraphs 52 to 56) it did so in respect of ethical considerations, stressing that the list in Article 3(1) is not exhaustive. Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 points in the same direction: its Article 5(1) includes the protection of the environment among the matters food law must take into account, and its Article 16 prohibits labelling and presentation, including packaging materials, from misleading consumers.
What was missing was precision. Article 3(1) states a purpose, but does not say when an environmental claim is ambiguous or misleading. Directive 2024/825 provides those criteria, with a telling coincidence: point 10a, which prohibits presenting as distinctive what the law requires of all, restates in consumer law terms the logic already contained in Article 7(1)(c) of Regulation 1169/2011, which prohibits suggesting that a food possesses special characteristics when all similar foods possess them. The relationship between the two bodies of law is therefore one of concretion: the horizontal consumer rule gives operational content to a purpose the sectoral food rule had already embraced. This is, it should be noted, the reverse of the usual direction, in which the sectoral rule specifies the horizontal one under Article 3(4) of Directive 2005/29/EC.
The legal consequence is that the Directive's criteria may be used to interpret Articles 7 and 36 of Regulation 1169/2011 regardless of transposition. This is not a matter of applying an untransposed directive against private parties, but of interpreting a directly applicable regulation consistently with the rest of Union law — the same method the Court uses in paragraph 28 of Psagot. The obligation arises from the regulation; the directive helps to define its content.
The perimeter of this reasoning requires a classification that no rule states as such, but whose criteria do have a legal anchor.
The first group consists of claims whose object is the food, understood under Article 2 of Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 as any substance or product intended to be ingested. Within it, two degrees of fit should be distinguished. Claims about provenance (“locally sourced”) or composition (“made with upcycled ingredients”) fall within the literal wording of Article 7(1)(a), which expressly mentions composition and place of provenance. Claims about the environmental impact of the process (“grown with renewable energy”, “reduced carbon footprint”) require an interpretative step: treating that impact as part of the food's method of production. It is a defensible reading in the light of Article 3(1), but not a settled one. The same applies to extending to these cases the requirement of Article 36(2)(c) that information be based on scientific data, which was originally conceived for information of a different kind.
The second group, outside the food regime, comprises claims that concern only the packaging (“100% recyclable packaging”) and corporate claims (“a climate-committed company”). Their exclusion follows from the definition itself: packaging is not food, and food contact materials have their own regime under Regulation (EC) No 1935/2004, so a claim concerning only the packaging is not information relating to a food. These claims are governed by unfair commercial practices law alone.
The third group is an intermediate zone: broad, unspecified terms (“sustainable”) placed next to the name of the product, trade names with an environmental connotation, or life-cycle footprints that aggregate production, packaging and distribution. Here, classification depends on the overall impression the presentation makes on the average consumer. The anchor is Article 7(4)(b) of Regulation 1169/2011, which extends the prohibition on misleading information to the presentation of foods, including their packaging and the packaging materials used, and Article 16 of Regulation 178/2002. When the presentation projects onto the food an attribute that belongs only to the packaging, the deception concerns the food — and that is exactly the conduct point 4b of the Directive describes when it prohibits presenting a claim about one aspect as relating to the whole.
The classification is not an academic exercise. It determines whether the dual regime applies or only unfair practices law, which penalty provisions can be invoked, and what burden of substantiation the operator bears. In practice, the perimeter is also wider than it might seem: on food packaging, most environmental claims refer to the product or its production, and those that concern only the packaging are mainly recyclability claims, which do not escape the intermediate zone either when they are not clearly delimited.
Nor does transposition resolve this interplay. In the Spanish case, the draft Sustainable Consumption Act and its regulatory impact report contain no reference to food law or to Regulation 1169/2011. Once national law is adopted, food business operators will remain subject to two regimes whose relationship the legislature has not made explicit, and the need to read them together will not disappear with transposition.
The legal implications for operators
The first consequence is that late transposition gives food business operators less room than it appears to, and it is worth identifying the routes through which the risk can materialise. The Spanish system serves as a worked example; the structure of the analysis is transferable to other Member States.
The administrative route has a clear legal basis, though not the one one might expect. Spain's Law 17/2011 on food safety and nutrition penalises insufficient, defective or fraudulent labelling, but its scope is food safety and nutrition, and its fit with a misleading environmental claim is forced. The clearest anchor lies in the consolidated General Law for the Defence of Consumers and Users, whose Article 47(1)(g) penalises breaches of the rules on labelling, packaging and advertising of goods. Articles 7 and 36 of Regulation 1169/2011 are rules of that kind. Operators must therefore expect enforcement to come from the consumer protection authorities.
This route has a limit that is also the main line of defence. Since the Court of Justice's judgment in Kolpinghuis Nijmegen (C-80/86, 8 October 1987), consistent interpretation cannot by itself determine or aggravate liability to penalties, and national principles of legality apply on top of that. The authority will have to show that the claim is misleading under Article 7 of the Regulation in its own right; the Directive may guide that assessment, but cannot replace it or import into penalty proceedings the per se prohibitions of its Annex.
The civil route is probably the most immediate. A competitor can bring an unfair competition action based on the general clause on misleading practices, interpreted in line with the Directive, and also rely on the breach of Regulation 1169/2011. In Spain, Article 217(4) of the Civil Procedure Act places on the defendant the burden of proving the accuracy and truthfulness of its statements. In a market where naturalness and sustainability are first-rank commercial differentiators, it is reasonable to expect disputes to arise between competitors before any inspection does.
The most practical consequence follows: the technical substantiation of every environmental claim about the food must exist before the packaging reaches the market. Not because any rule in force imposes prior third-party verification — which is what the Green Claims proposal sought and never achieved — but because Article 36(2)(c) requires a basis in the relevant data and because, if litigation comes, the burden of proof will fall on whoever makes the claim. This reading of Article 36(2)(c) extends to environmental data a requirement originally designed for information of a different kind; it is defensible, but should be taken as a criterion of prudence rather than as a settled rule.
How to review labelling in the light of Directive 2024/825 and Regulation 1169/2011
A useful review combines both regimes and follows an order that is not indifferent.
- The starting point is a complete inventory of messages with possible environmental content on the packaging, the label, the website and point-of-sale materials, including symbols, images, colours and names or brands with an environmental connotation. The Commission's questions and answers accept that terms such as “natural” may constitute an environmental claim when, in context, they convey that message, even in a brand name.
- The second step is defining the perimeter: for each message, determining whether it concerns a characteristic of the food, whether it is a packaging claim projected onto the food, or whether it concerns only the packaging or the company. That classification determines which regime applies and before which authority it may be challenged.
- The third is interpretation in line with the Directive: whether the claim is generic and, if so, whether it can be specified on the same medium or must be withdrawn — bearing in mind that the specification must appear on the same medium and that a reference to a website or a QR code does not replace it; whether a partial claim is presented as relating to the whole product; whether any neutrality or reduction claim rests on offsetting; whether requirements imposed on the whole category are presented as an advantage. At this stage, sustainability labels are also reviewed — they must be based on a certification scheme or established by public authorities — as are claims about future performance, which require an implementation plan verified by an independent expert, and the use of “organic” or “bio”, reserved for products certified under Regulation (EU) 2018/848.
- The fourth is substantiation. For every claim concerning the food there should be a file setting out the methodology, the data and the calculation choices made, especially for carbon footprint claims, where the absence of a binding harmonised methodology does not reduce the burden of proof but requires explaining why the method chosen is appropriate.
- The last is managing existing stocks and communication already disseminated, since conformity is also required for products manufactured before 27 September, with solutions such as stickers or additional information at the point of sale.
Conclusion: a reading not yet tested in court, but not without precedent
No court has yet ruled on reading environmental claims as food information. The most visible European reference, the klimaneutral judgment of the German Bundesgerichtshof of 27 June 2024 (I ZR 98/23), concerning a confectionery manufacturer, was decided solely under § 5 of the German Unfair Competition Act, without any mention of Regulation 1169/2011. That silence, however, is explained by the facts rather than by a doctrinal choice: the claim appeared in an advertisement in a trade journal, the Lebensmittel Zeitung, aimed at the trade and not made available to the final consumer, which is the premise of food information under Article 2(2)(a) of the Regulation. In substance, the judgment converges with the thesis set out here. The court held that advertising with environmental terms is subject to the same strict requirements of accuracy, unambiguity and clarity as health-related advertising, in a line going back to its Umweltengel judgment of 1988; that the meaning of an ambiguous environmental term must be clarified in the advertisement itself, a reference to a website or a QR code not being enough; and that emission reduction takes priority over offsetting. That is, in essence, the standard Directive 2024/825 has codified and that food law knows well from its regime for health claims.
The thesis rests on a text in force since 2011 and on an interpretative method the Court of Justice applies routinely, but how authorities and courts will receive it remains to be seen. The practical question for companies in the sector is therefore not whether the Directive will reach them once it is transposed, but whether their labelling would withstand scrutiny today under food law itself.
Javier Gómez Sanz is the founder and director of Food Tech Legal. Comments on this analysis may be sent to editorial@foodtechlegal.com. Enquiries about a specific product or case are handled through the quote form. The original Spanish version of this analysis is available here.