Food companies should be forced to reveal how healthy or unhealthy their products are to help people consume a better diet, an industry boss has said.
Ministers should oblige companies to publish an annual report so that consumers can see how much of their turnover consists of dishes that contain too much fat, salt and sugar, according to Stéfan Descheemaeker.
Descheemaeker is the CEO of Nomad Foods, owner of popular brands such as Birds Eye fish sticks, Findus frozen foods and Goodfella's pizzas.
He told the Guardian that mandatory publication of what proportion of each company's turnover is considered healthy or unhealthy according to government guidelines would spark a "food arms race" in which manufacturers would compete to make their products better for health.
He also urged Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, to ensure all cans and packets of food carry traffic light-style labels. 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 backed growing calls - backed by the House of Lords and the Labour-Friendly Institute for Public Policy Research think tank - for a new tax on products containing excessive amounts of salt or sugar.
His comments underline what one diet campaigner called the "quiet revolution" taking place in the industry in its vision of how best to tackle Britain's addiction to unhealthy food. More and more manufacturers now want the government to order the industry to improve its behavior, 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 requiring all food companies to do this would create a nutritional arms race, triggering an industry-wide reformulation that would ultimately increase the production, sales and consumption of tasty, healthy food," Descheemaeker said in an interview.
Stéfan Descheemaeker at the Nomad Foods headquarters in Woking. Photo: Laura Rose Whereatt/The Guardian
Over the past seven years, Nomad has published figures showing what percentage of net sales is considered healthy under the government's nutritional profiling model, which assesses which products contain the right or wrong amounts of fat, salt and sugar. It was now 93.3% of overall health, he said, according to the official high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) rating system.
Public disclosure of food companies' sales would allow the creation of rankings, naming and shaming those whose products are more likely to be unhealthy, backers say.
Tesco, Sainsbury's, Iceland and the yoghurt maker Danone have already made it clear that they support mandatory reporting. The last government set up a "food data transparency partnership" with the industry, with the aim of making details of companies' sales public. Despite being conceived as binding, it became a purely voluntary measure following protests from the industry.
"We believe that mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labeling can play a crucial role in helping the public understand what is healthy and what is not," Descheemaeker said. "We have seen this work in other European markets, such as France, where 'nutri-scores' have been shown to influence healthier purchasing decisions."
Some supermarkets and retailers in Britain use color-coded labels on some or all of their products to warn consumers about how healthy or unhealthy they are, but the system is voluntary.
Both measures would push food manufacturers to reformulate their products by reducing the amount of fat, salt and sugar in them, Descheemaeker said. That's easier than some companies say, he added. He cited how Nomad had overhauled the nutritional content of Goodfella's pizzas since purchasing the brand in 2018, removing fat, salt and calories and adding more fiber so that it now meets HFSS rules as a healthy product.
Nomad has also reduced the sugar in Aunt Bessie's apple crumbles by 30% and added 15% more fiber, so it too now counts as HFSS compliant. For the same reason, since 2020 the company has also reduced the amount of salt in some of its products, such as Birds Eye fish sticks (21%) and potato waffles (28%).
He said the scale of Britain's obesity crisis was so great, and the role of poor nutrition in causing serious diseases such as obesity and cancer, that the food industry in general had to show much more "responsibility" to tackle the problem. improve public health.
James Toop, the chief executive of chef Jamie Oliver's diet campaign group Bite Back, said mandating data transparency would change a situation where most major food companies rely on the sale of unhealthy products for their profits.
"Our research this year found that our biggest food manufacturers in Britain made the majority of their profits from selling unhealthy products. It is encouraging to see that a growing number of food industry leaders are now openly supporting bold government actions to improve the nutritional quality of what they sell," he said.
"This silent revolution taking place in the UK food industry - with companies recognizing their role in reducing the junk they package as food and committing to healthier products - is one we should all harness. Many of these leaders are now making it clear that they want public policies that create a level playing field based on regulations, not just voluntary changes, so that everyone is held to the same high standards.
"It is crucial that we see measures such as mandatory reporting on healthier sales and front-of-pack traffic light labels to hold companies accountable for offering healthier food alternatives."
Last week, the House of Lords Food, Diet, Nutrition and Obesity Committee urged ministers to take a much more robust approach to the food industry to help tackle the "public health emergency".
It called for routine reporting of sales data, a new salt and sugar tax model modeled on the sugar tax, and "a decisive shift from voluntary measures to a system of mandatory regulation of the food industry."
Earlier this year, Streeting warned food companies that a Labor government would use a "steamroller" to force them to reformulate their products, but he has taken no action to pursue that since becoming health secretary in July. He is believed to prefer reformulation to imposing a tax on salty and sugary products, given the cost of living crisis.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: "We are taking a range of actions to tackle the obesity crisis head-on - shifting our focus from treatment to prevention - to ease the pressure on a critically ill NHS and help people help you live a good life. for longer.
"We are taking proportionate action, including restricting junk food advertising on TV and online, authorizing councils to block the development of new fast food outlets outside schools, and banning the sale of energy drinks to under-16s.
"Our ten-year health plan will also transform the NHS by shifting the focus from disease to prevention."
