Fibre labelling rules are stuck in transit: our take on the M&S campaign
UK food regulation lets a retailer print a scientifically approved sentence about fibre on a pack and forbids that same retailer from saying the plain-English version, even when both statements are equally true. The GB nutrition and health claims register permits a phrase like fibre contributing to an increase in faecal bulk, and blocks something closer to fibre supports gut health. One version is legally sound and commercially useless. The other is how people actually talk about food.
Marks & Spencer has decided this is worth fixing. Food managing director Alex Freudmann, working with a nutritionist and a Bowel Cancer UK ambassador, wrote to the Health Secretary calling for a review of the wording retailers are permitted to use. The National Diet and Nutrition Survey puts the scale of the problem beyond doubt: the great majority of UK adults consume well below the recommended daily fibre intake. M&S's own research found that most of its customers already want to eat more fibre. So the gap here is not appetite or awareness. It is vocabulary, and the vocabulary is fixed by regulation rather than by common sense.
This is not only a food story. It is one instance of a pattern our agency spends most of its time studying, which we call the Belief Gap: the distance between what an institution is technically permitted to say and what the public actually needs to hear in order to trust and act on it. The same gap explains why pension wake-up packs run to dozens of pages nobody reads, why medicine leaflets bury the one instruction that matters under a full history of every side effect ever logged, and why financial services documents manage to be both mandatory and ignored. In every one of these cases, the rules were written to protect people. In practice, they have made the official version unreadable, which pushes people towards louder, less careful sources instead.
That is the argument the op-ed makes, and it is worth adding a detail the article did not have room for. The GB register's own back catalogue is full of near-comic examples of exactly this failure. Regulators have taken years to approve claims as ordinary as prunes supporting normal bowel function. The most recently authorised fibre claim, granted to kiwifruit, permits wording about increased stool frequency rather than anything resembling normal speech. None of this is a failure of science. The evidence behind these claims is generally solid. It is a failure of translation from evidence into language a shopper standing in front of a shelf can actually use.
We took this piece on because closing that translation gap, for clients in food and drink, agriculture, defence, financial services, energy and pharmaceuticals, is a large part of what SPQR does.
M&S has picked a genuinely small, fixable example of a very large problem, and we think it deserves support well beyond its immediate competitors. You can read Mike's full op-ed in The Grocer, and the original M&S letter, linked above.
SPQR is a digital-first strategic communications agency that works with organisations in contested sectors to measure and close the gap between what they can prove and what their audiences believe. If you are building the evidence, we can help build the belief.
Get in touch at info@wearespqr.com
