Food businesses and investors call on UK government to tackle unhealthy diets

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UK businesses and investors are urging the government to tackle diet-related ill health with tighter regulatory scrutiny of the food industry, as long-term diseases such as obesity hit productivity.  

Weighing in on the nation’s food policy for the first time since the election of the Labour government, Tesco, Iceland, Nomad Foods and three institutional investors said companies should be legally required to report on the percentage of revenue from sales of products high in fat, salt and sugar.

They told the Financial Times that ministers should set out a road map for legislation to tackle poor diets. The calls follow the release of official data showing 2.8mn people in the UK were economically inactive because of long-term illnesses. 

“Clearly there is a childhood obesity crisis and it’s getting worse . . . We would welcome a raft of different reforms to incentivise healthier diets,” said Lauren Woodley, group nutrition leader at Birdseye fish finger maker Nomad Foods.

“There has been a lot of uncertainty across the tenure of the previous government. And with uncertainty it makes it difficult to plan,” she added.

The demands come as Labour outlines its plans to ease pressure on the NHS — one of the party’s five priorities while in government.

Tesco said delays and the watering down of key legislation to improve the nation’s diets had created an uneven playing field within the industry.

Oonagh Turnbull, Tesco’s head of health, said the “stop-start” approach of the previous Conservative administration when it came to implementing the reforms had been a big challenge for retailers. “We’ve got a massive role to play but to make a real difference, we need the whole industry to play by the same rules,” she said.

Turnbull said the retailer welcomed regulation designed in consultation with business, pointing to the success of legislation that banned retailers from promoting products high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) at prominent locations in store, which was introduced in 2022.

“We believe the reformulation wouldn’t have happened at the same scale and pace if it hadn’t been for the [HFSS] legislation. It drove change,” she added.  

Woodley said new measures were needed to fight the obesity crisis, including greater data transparency and advertising restrictions, as well as educating consumers around healthy eating.

“A tax that is well thought out that looks at HFSS foods is a lever which the government could use, but it comes with the strong caveat that taxation alone doesn’t shift behaviour,” she said.

The retailers pointed to the previous government shelving plans to ban junk food advertising on television before 9pm and online, from the end of 2022, to fight childhood obesity.

Plans through a Food Data Transparency Partnership to make reporting of health metrics mandatory for food companies and retailers had been watered down. The partnership was set up in 2022, following a recommendation in Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy.

Investors have been increasing pressure on food companies to set more ambitious health and nutrition targets in order to de-risk their portfolios from the environmental and social impacts of unhealthy food.

However, asset managers said that in the absence of regulation, companies lacked incentives for real change, whether to reformulate their products to make them healthier or to record nutritional and environmental data. 

Rachel Crossley, head of stewardship in Europe for BNP Paribas Asset Management, said it was crucial that data reporting was mandatory so that investors had comparative data with which to assess companies.

“If we’re going to incorporate that data into our rating systems and our investment decisions, we have to have consistent approaches.”

Sophie Lawrence, stewardship and engagement lead at Rathbone Greenbank Investments, said history had shown that a lot of voluntary reporting frameworks failed to drive change. 

“If you look at the voluntary sugar reduction programmes, in the time that they’ve been operating obesity has actually kind of doubled in the UK,” she said.

The Department of Health and Social Care said: “This government is urgently tackling the obesity crisis head on — shifting our focus from treatment to prevention — to ease the strain on our NHS and helping people to live well for longer.”