Consumers are being “bombarded with language” when it comes to food labelling, Grace Binchy, trends and insights specialist with Bord Bia has said.

She told the Guild of Agricultural Journalists of Ireland Michael Dillon lecture on Friday that consumers don’t necessarily understand what grass-fed and plant-based mean.

“We’re living in a world where consumers are more like food citizens, so there’s an awful lot of misinformation out there and I think that’s one of the problems we need to overcome as well.

“You have 34% of Gen Z (the generation born between the mid- to late 1990s and mid-2000s) globally that they find there’s too much misinformation there.

“A lot of consumers are being bombarded with language, so if we look at the language we put on packs, everything from plant-based to grass-fed, consumers don’t necessarily understand what that means. I know that staff in the British Nutrition Foundation said that 61% of people in the UK won’t try plant-based because they don’t know what it means. So there’s a huge job to be done there.”