Success story of food reformulation monitoring, building capacities from French good practice to implementation in 19 EU member states

Abstract

Abstract Obesogenic environments stimulate the consumption of excess calories through HFSS foods. Therefore, activities aimed at reformulating foods into healthier alternatives are the first crucial step in improving the food supply for children. Harmonised EU monitoring of the reformulation actions was addressed as one of the key approaches in creating healthier options for children and their caregivers. Supported by the EU AP on childhood obesity 2014-2020, access to an improved and healthier food offer in supermarkets should be made easier. Currently, only a few European countries are monitoring processed food supply at the brand level, and this deprives European and national policy makers of an objective description of the situation to define and assess nutrition policies. JA Best-ReMaP, building on the JANPA and EUREMO outcomes, aimed to fill in the reformulation monitoring gap and to add to the improved access to high quality foods for the European citizens, especially for children. To do so, in 19 European countries, JA Best-ReMaP implemented a standardised European monitoring system for processed food reformulation. Such a tool, at a country level, enables to monitor food offerings and nutritional content of individual monitored processed foods, as well as to identify best formulation and room for reformulation of the food produced, sold, and consumed. Complex steps were taken in the project implementation, including the identification of the priority processed food groups for a European monitoring of the food supply, exploration of the new technologies and new sources of data capacities for nutrition data collection, development of the knowledge to conduct and analyse own data collection in the participating EU MSs, explorative development of an open European branded foods database, and first attempt of the European analysis of the trends of the nutritional quality of processed food and their impacts.