Food businesses should be forced to show how healthy or unhealthy their products are, to help people eat a better diet, an industry boss has said.
Ministers should force companies to publish an annual report so that consumers can see how much of their sales are made up of dishes with too much fat, salt and sugar, Stéfan Descheemaeker also said.
Descheemaeker is the chief executive of Nomad Foods, which owns popular brands such as Birds Eye fish fingers, Findus frozen foods and Goodfella pizzas.
He told the Guardian that mandatory publication of the percentage of each firm’s sales that counts as healthy or unhealthy under government guidelines would start a “nutrition arms race” in which manufacturers would compete with each other to improve their products for health.
He also urged Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to ensure that all tins and packets of foodstuffs carry labels such as traffic lights. This would also help tackle the obesity crisis as it would encourage people to choose more nutritious foods and avoid less healthy options, he said.
And he has thrown his weight behind growing calls – backed by the House of Lords and the Labour-backed Institute for Public Policy Research think tank – for a new tax on overpriced products salt or sugar in them.
His comments highlight what one diet campaigner called the “quiet revolution” taking place in the industry in his views on how best to tackle the UK’s addiction to unhealthy food. More manufacturers want the government to now order the sector to improve its behaviour, rather than relying on voluntary agreements as the Conservatives did during their 14 years in power.
“We support measures that require companies to publish data. We believe that if all food companies were asked to do this it would trigger a nutrition arms race, starting an industry-wide reformation campaign, increasing the production, sale and consumption of tasty, ultimately healthy food,” said Descheemaeker in an interview.
For the past seven years Nomad has published figures showing the percentage of its net sales that are considered healthy under the government’s nutrient profiling model to assess which products contain the right or wrong amounts of fat, salt and sugar. It was now at 93.3% healthy overall, he said, according to the official high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) assessment system.
Public disclosure of food businesses’ sales would allow league tables to be created that would allow those whose products are more unhealthy to be named and shamed, supporters say.
Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Iceland and yoghurt maker Danone have already said they support mandatory reporting. The last government introduced a “food data transparency partnership” with industry aimed at making details of companies’ sales available to the public. Although it was supposed to be binding, it became a purely voluntary measure after industry protests.
“We believe that mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labeling could play a critical role in helping the public understand what is healthy and what is not,” said Descheemaeker. “We have seen this work in other European markets, such as France, where ‘nutritional scores’ have been shown to influence healthier purchasing decisions.”
Some supermarkets and retailers in the UK use colour-coded labels on some or all of their products to inform consumers about how healthy or unhealthy they are, but the system is voluntary.
Both measures would encourage food manufacturers to reformulate their products by reducing the amount of fat, salt and sugar they contain, Descheemaeker said. It’s easier to do that than some businesses have claimed, he said. He mentioned how Nomad had reformed the nutritional composition of Goodfella pizzas since buying the brand in 2018, by removing fat, salt and calories and adding more fibre, so that it now meets the HFSS rules as a healthy product.
Nomad has reduced the sugar content of Aunt Bessie’s apple by 30% and added 15% more fiber so it is now considered HFSS compliant. Since 2020, the company has also reduced the amount of salt in some of its products such as Birds Eye fish fingers (21%) and potato waffles (28%) for the same reason.
He said the scale of Britain’s obesity crisis was so great, and the role of poor diet in causing major diseases such as obesity and cancer so great, that the food industry as a whole needed to “take much greater responsibility”. be shown to improve public health.
James Toop, chief executive of chef Jamie Oliver’s diet campaign group Bite Back, said data transparency would change a situation where most big food companies depend on sales of unhealthy products for their profits.
“Our research this year showed that our biggest UK food manufacturers made most of their profits from selling unhealthy products. It is heartening to see that a growing number of senior food industry leaders are now openly supporting the government’s bold move to improve the nutritional quality of what they sell,” he said.
“This quiet revolution taking place in the UK food industry – with companies recognizing their role in reducing the packaging waste they produce as food and committing to healthier products – is something we should all benefit from get rid of Many of these leaders are now making it clear that they want government policies that create a level playing field based on regulation, not just voluntary changes, so that everyone is held to the same high standards.
“It is vital that we see measures such as mandatory reporting of healthier sales and front-of-pack traffic light labels to hold companies accountable for providing healthier food options.”
Last week the House of Lords food, diet and nutrition and obesity committee urged ministers to take a much stronger approach to the food industry to help tackle the obesity “public health emergency”.
He called for normal reporting of sales data, a new salt and sugar tax model modeled on the sugar tax, and a “decisive transition from voluntary measures to a system of compulsory control of the food industry”.
Earlier this year Streeting warned food companies that a Labor government would use a “seamroller” to force them to reformulate their products, but he has yet to take any action to pursue that since becoming health secretary in month July. It is understood that he prefers reformulation to taxing fatty and sugary products because of the cost of living crisis.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “We are taking a range of actions to tackle the obesity crisis head-on – shifting our focus from treatment to prevention – to reduce the pressure on a critically ill NHS relieve and help people live well. for longer.
“We are taking proportionate action including, restricting junk food advertising on TV and online, giving councils the power to block the development of fast food outlets outside schools, and banning the sale of energy drinks for people under 16 years of age.
“Our 10-year health plan will also reform the NHS by shifting its focus from illness to prevention.”