Invitation to collect data from personal and household care products for assessing alleged differen

EUROPEAN COMMISSION DIRECTORATE-GENERAL JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE Directorate F - Health, Consumers & Reference Materials (Geel/Ispra) Fraud Detection & Prevention

In the frame of the implementation of the European Parliament sponsored Preparatory Action “Assessing alleged differences in the quality of products sold on the Single Market”, the JRC invited the Member States to prioritise personal and household care products for inclusion in the testing programme. To this end, a list containing 448 personal care and 151 household care products was distributed in January 2021; 13 Member States returned prioritised product lists. Consumer complaints regarding possible ‘dual quality’ issues received by Member States’ authorities or consumer organisations, results of product comparisons made in the past, or other relevant observations indicative for product differentiation were the criteria for prioritisation using either ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ grades. The received lists were combined and ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ grades were re-coded as 3, 2, or 1 priority point(s), respectively. Products were then ranked by the sum of priority points attributed by the Member States and then by the number of Member States prioritising the product to create a ranked list of products (Priority list for data collection.xlsx, available for download at https://jrcbox.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php/s/A4BvErcb9vAsVtl/authenticate, password: Geel20122!). The link for downloading the prioritisation file is valid until 24/03/2022. I kindly invite you to collect product data (photographs of the front-of-pack and the ingredient lists) of the prioritised products and submit them to the JRC for evaluation. The aim is to collect data from 100 products (60 personal and 40 household care products). As the products may not always be available in all Member States and as the brand names may show some differences, the tabs in the Excel file indicate a core group of 60 personal and 40 household care products, marked in yellow colour, and a reserve of 20 products per category, marked in blue colour. Product data from the core group shall be preferentially collected. Only in case that a product from the core group is not available, it can be replaced by products from the reserve. Data have to be submitted in form of photographs of the products, clearly showing the front-ofpack and the ingredient list. Member States have to translate the ingredient list into the English language and record the translated ingredient list in a template provided by the JRC. Apps for optical character recognition (OCR) that can extract text from photos for pasting into a document as well as for translating the text, are freely available and can facilitate this task. The JRC will reimburse the data collection effort made by the Member States’ competent authorities or consumer organisations by paying 30 (thirty) Euros per complete data set (photographs and ingredient list) up to a maximum of 3000 (three thousand) Euros. Please, let me know until 17 March 2022 whether you will participate in this data collection campaign. A WebEx conference will be organised on 10 March 2022, 10:00-12:00 for those interested to participate, where details of the data collection will be explained (join the meeting, WebEx link will also be sent by separate email). In case of questions, do not hesitate to contact me. Kind regards, Head of Uni