Abstract
AbstractNew plans to restrict in‐store price and location‐based promotions of less healthy foods and drinks in the UK aimed to encourage healthier choices. With responsibility for implementation likely falling to food retailers, it is important to understand the feasibility of implementation and to ensure policy success. To ensure compliance, retailers will need to assess which products are restricted under the legislation. The large number of products in retailers’ portfolios poses a problem of scale. A recent research case study found the data available to retailers to be insufficient to accurately apply the rules‐based approach set out by the policy proposal. Misclassification would result in some less healthy products being incorrectly promoted and vice versa. Problems with implementation feasibility have the potential to undermine the public health goals of the legislation. Interviews were carried out with nutrition representatives from the UK food retail and manufacturing sector, to understand the real‐world implications of the proposed legislation. Industry nutritionists recommended a review of the use of the UK’s Nutrient Profiling Model as the legislative basis, proposed data‐related solutions to implementation problems and suggested a need for shared retailer‐manufacturer responsibility, given the context of data availability.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to report reflections on the findings of our case study from interviews with six food industry nutritionists
Building upon the modelled data-related challenges of implementing proposed new legislation to restrict pricebased and location-based food promotions (Jenneson et al 2020a), this study presents these in a real-world context and proposes solutions supported by food industry nutritionists
Government documentation confirms the use of the 2004/2005 NPM for future legislation on promotions (DHSC 2019; GOV.UK 2020), we explored the hypothetical situation of its replacement by the draft 2018 NPM, which was developed for the restriction of marketing to children
Summary
Are vulnerable to food marketing (Carter et al 2011), which promotes the over-consumption of high-calorie foods and drinks contributing to obesity (PHE 2015, 2018b). The UK has restricted food advertising during children’s television and other digital media since 2007 (The Food Foundation 2017). The government’s latest obesity strategy plans to limit food marketing in England even further, by restricting price and location-based promotions of products high in saturated fat, salt and/or sugars (HFSS) (DHSC 2020b). The Scottish Parliament has announced its own plans to limit promotions of HFSS foods and drinks across both the retail and out of home sectors (Scottish Government 2018). Introduction of the new legislation in Scotland has been put on hold in the light of the COVID19 pandemic (Talking Retail 2020), the proposals have sparked debate among industry stakeholders about the potential divergence in the UK legislative framework for food promotions and consideration of the feasibility of the two proposals
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