During EXPO 2015 in Milan, AIDEPI (now ‘UNIONE ITALIANA FOOD’) signed the voluntary Code of the Ministry of Health “Guidelines for the commercial communication relating to food and drink for the protection of children and proper nutrition”.
This Code defines basic rules on the correct advertising of food to children taken from the Advertising Self-Regulatory Code applied by the National Institute of Self-regulation of Advertisement (Istituto di Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria -IAP), without any kind of threshold-based system that could lead to an unjustified classification between bad and good foods.
In 2017, an overview of case law regarding self-disciplinary action in Italy showed that advertisements for food products are rarely in breach of Article 11 of the “Children and Adolescents” code and even recently, guidelines have been amply implemented.
