Lactalis Takes Its Nutri-Score Fight to Europe's Top Court: Why a Dairy Giant's Labelling Battle Could Reshape Front-of-Pack Rules

The world's largest dairy company is now fighting France in Europe's highest court. The weapon is a coloured label the size of a stamp.

Lactalis, the privately owned French group behind Parmalat, Galbani and Président, has confirmed that its legal challenge to Nutri-Score will go before the Court of Justice of the European Union. France's Council of State, the Conseil d'État, has paused its own ruling and asked the EU court to interpret the law first. For a fight about front-of-pack labels, the stakes are unusually large.

What Lactalis is actually arguing

Nutri-Score grades food and drink from a green A to a red E. France built the system in 2017 and changed how it works in March 2025. Lactalis filed an appeal in September 2025 to cancel that change. Its case is simple: nutrition information on packs is set by one EU-wide rule, the INCO Regulation (Regulation 1169/2011), so a single country should not be able to bolt on its own mandatory version.

The March 2025 update is what stings dairy. Milk, flavoured milks, drinkable yogurts and plant-based drinks are now scored with the algorithm used for soft drinks. Water is the only drink that can earn an A. Drinks with sweeteners dropped from a B to somewhere between C and E. A category that sells itself on protein and calcium now sits on the same scale as cola.

Lactalis is not alone

Rivals have already voted with their feet. Danone pulled out of Nutri-Score, calling it "a major inconsistency" that lumps dairy drinks in with soft drinks. Nestlé said last year it would start stripping the labels off some products in Switzerland as shopper use faded, while keeping them elsewhere in Europe. Portugal backed away from rolling out the labels in 2024 over "confusing classifications." Italy decided back in 2022 that the scheme could mislead people.

So Nutri-Score stays voluntary, and only six countries use it: France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. That voluntary status is the whole battlefield. France has been pushing the European Commission to make the label compulsory across the bloc, with another attempt last November. A win for Lactalis at the EU court would make that much harder. A loss could clear the runway for a mandatory, France-shaped label on every pack in Europe.

Why a label fight is really a margin fight

Front-of-pack scores look cosmetic. They are not. A letter on the front of the box changes what shoppers buy, what retailers stock and how hard a company has to reformulate. A B that turns into a D can push a product off a supermarket's "better choice" shelf or out of a school contract. When the rules of the score change, the worth of a recipe changes with it, overnight, with the product itself untouched.

This is why the case matters well beyond cheese. Every large food and drink maker now runs its portfolio partly to the test of these scores. Sugar, salt, fat and sweetener choices are tuned to them. If the EU court says a national government cannot set its own mandatory label on top of the shared EU rule, it limits how far France, or any member state, can move the goalposts. If the court sides with France, makers face a future where one country's algorithm can reprice their whole range.

What to watch next

The case now runs at European level, which means a wait. Referrals to the EU court often take more than a year. The bigger signal is that Big Food has stopped treating Nutri-Score as a marketing nicety and started treating it as regulation worth fighting in court. Danone exited. Lactalis is suing. Nestlé is trimming. The mood has turned from polite participation to open resistance.

For operators and investors, the read-across is direct. Front-of-pack labelling is moving from a voluntary badge to a contested legal standard, and the result will set how much power any single market has to grade your products. Anyone selling dairy, drinks or reformulated snacks in Europe should treat this referral as a live risk to shelf position and pricing. The cheese headline understates how far it reaches.