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Industry group wants standard on sugary drinks to be voluntary
Food and beverage industry association Gapmmi is suggesting that the government impose a voluntary national standard for sugar content in sweetened beverages, rather than mandatory SNI certification.
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A woman walks on Dec. 14, 2023.past a rack of sugar-sweetened beverages in a Jakarta supermarket. (Antara/Cahya Sari)
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he Indonesian Food and Beverage Association (Gapmmi) has suggested that the government form a technical working group to evaluate the potential impact of compulsory Indonesia National Standard (SNI) certification for sugar content in sweetened beverages.
“We hope that the SNI rule can be implemented voluntarily as part of an educational process. We hope the industry will follow the [voluntary] standard and that we can prevent businesses from breaking the rules,” Gapmmi chairman Adhi Lukman said on Saturday, as quoted by news portal Kumparan.
Adhi admitted that in the long run, mandatory SNI certification was a good measure to ensure product quality and provide guidance to producers.
Gapmmi members were looking for other ways to reduce sugar consumption aside from the government’s proposed excise on sugar-sweetened beverages, because “now is not the time to enforce it”, he said.
Read also: Plastic, sweet beverage excise to cause more problems than it solves: Businesses
Plans to impose an excise on sweetened beverages and plastic products have been on the cards since 2016, but no substantial progress had been made until 2022, when the government included revenue collection targets for the taxes in the 2023 budget: Rp 3.08 trillion (US$190 million) for sweetened beverages and Rp 980 billion for plastic goods.
But the government has yet to issue any implementing regulations specifying which products are subject to the excise.
