“Veggie burgers” and “vegan sausages” can remain on European supermarket shelves, EU negotiators agreed Thursday. However, only products made of animal flesh can use terms like “steak” or “bacon.”
Unless that flesh was grown in a lab, in which case, those terms are also off-limits.
Those are the broad contours of the compromise reached by EU institutions after an MEP’s sleeper initiative to block vegetarian alternatives from using terms associated with meat — the so-called veggie burger ban — fueled political tensions over an otherwise technical farm file.
After months of debate, institutional negotiators agreed on new rules that would ban vegetarian products from using dozens of terms that are typically associated with meat, including “chicken,” “ribs,” “bacon,” “tenderloin,” “liver” and “steak.” The deal still needs to be formally signed off by the Parliament and EU member capitals.
The fight exposed a deeper divide in Brussels food politics.
Consumer groups attacked the lengthy list of banned words as doing little to help people trying to make choices at the store.
“Consumers want to eat healthier and need convenient and affordable options,” said BEUC chief Agustín Reyna. Meat-related names “make it easy for those who want to integrate these options in their diets, and the new rules will increase confusion and are simply not necessary.”
For pro-farmer lawmakers on the center-right and right, protecting meaty terminology became a symbolic show of support for livestock producers reeling from sinking profits and regulatory fatigue. They cast themselves as bulwarks against a cosmopolitan push toward alternative proteins.
Greens and liberals, meanwhile, dismissed the debate as political theater aimed at farm constituencies, arguing it distracts from structural challenges in the food chain and clashes with Brussels’ competitiveness rhetoric.
Negotiators ultimately agreed that veggie sausages and burgers can continue to be sold.
The French MEP behind the terminology ban, Céline Imart, hailed the outcome as an “indisputable victory for our farmers.”
The agreement, she added, “recognizes the value of farmers’ work and protects their products, which are the result of unique expertise, against a form of unfair competition.”
Imart, a grain farmer, also pushed for protections to extend to “cell-cultured products” — i.e. meat grown in labs — which she has previously described as a threat to traditional agriculture.
For frustrated lawmakers, the move takes Europe in the wrong direction, essentially knee-capping a nascent sector.
“It is absurd that we are attempting to regulate the naming of products that aren’t even on the European market yet,” the Greens Parliamentary negotiator on the file, Anna Strolenberg, told POLITICO ahead of Thursday’s talks on cellular meat. “Our signal to biotech pioneers is: ‘Don’t build it in Europe, move abroad.’”
The compromise comes after months of negotiations between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission over targeted changes to the bloc’s Common Market Organisation law. The original intent was to update detailed laws on contracts, in the hopes of improving the position of farmers in the agri-food chain, following waves of protests.
However, when the proposal reached the Parliament, Imart, the European People’s Party MEP leading negotiations on the file, pushed for the inclusion of a list of meaty terms that would be off-limits to veggie copycats. That quickly became the most hotly debated element, as capitals scrambled to agree on common red lines.
In the end, a similar list proposed by the Commission for a future change to the CMO from 2028 onward was used as the basis of negotiations. The terms on this list were more narrow references to cuts and types of meat rather than catch-all terms like burger and sausage.
Via Politico
