The junk food clampdown isn't failing, it's working
A version of this article by our founder Mike Coppen-Gardner first appeared in The Grocer.
Last week the Advertising Standards Authority cleared a string of ads from Burger King, Domino's, KFC and Uber Eats of breaching the government's junk food marketing rules. Campaigners called it proof the clampdown had failed. Look closer and it shows the opposite: a policy working exactly as designed.
The ads were cleared because the products in them are no longer classified as less healthy under the UK's nutrient profiling model, and in several cases that is because the companies reformulated them. The ASA's own chief executive made the point: the rules are meant to push businesses to "reformulate their products so they are no longer classified as less healthy." That is precisely what happened. Regulation set the incentive, industry responded, and the system held.
Westminster is unlikely to read it that way. The pattern is familiar from the sugar levy and the HFSS rules: a cleared ruling becomes a loophole, a loophole becomes a consultation, and a consultation becomes a restriction or a tax. It is only a matter of time before the delivery economy, the platforms, the takeaways and the dark kitchens that supply them, faces curbs and levies of its own. Before that happens, someone should ask whether the target deserves the treatment.
This is one of the few unambiguous British growth stories of the past decade. Online food delivery is worth £14.3 billion, up 87% since 2019, sustaining thousands of restaurants that would not survive on footfall alone. Dark kitchens, which are commercial facilities with no storefront that cook solely for app orders, now account for one in seven outlets on the major platforms. Routinely described as sinister, they are in reality the lowest barrier to entry the food business has ever offered, and a large part of why the choice of cuisines on British menus has never been wider.
Nor is the public clamouring for protection. When University of Sheffield researchers produced the first agreed definition of a dark kitchen this year, fewer than one in four people had even heard of the term; once it was explained, more than half said they would consider ordering from one. What people wanted was transparency at the point of ordering, not prohibition. The industry should offer it, gladly and quickly.
The convenient scapegoat
The public health case leans on association rather than cause. Yes, takeaway density is linked to childhood obesity, and the most deprived areas have five times more fast-food outlets than the wealthiest. But density tracks poverty, and poverty, not the presence of an app, is the strongest predictor of obesity in Britain. Obesity rates climbed for three decades before the first delivery app was written. More than a quarter of people aged 16 to 29 now eat a takeaway at least twice a week, and their parents' generation did much the same. The app changed how food is ordered, not why it is eaten.
None of this denies the scale of the problem. Obesity-related illness costs the NHS around £12 billion a year. It is precisely because the bill is so large that policy must aim at causes rather than symbols. A takeaway levy is regressive by design, landing hardest on households already squeezed. And as last week's rulings showed, marketing rules bite hardest not on the giants with reformulation budgets but on the single chicken shop in Woking or the first-time founder in a rented kitchen.
Partners, not punchbags
The same instinct distorts the workforce debate. The Supreme Court confirmed in 2023 that riders are self-employed, and Labour's Employment Rights Act deliberately left that status untouched. The flexibility is not an accident of the model; for many thousands of riders it is the point of it.
There is a better path than the ratchet. Food manufacturers spent £180 million on reformulation in 2024 alone, with salt and sugar falling across categories. That is what happens when government sets clear incentives and industry invests. The delivery economy could be enlisted the same way. The platforms already display calorie information; they could go further, using the data they hold to promote healthier ranges, reward better choices and widen access to fresh food in the neighbourhoods that lack it.
Restricting takeaways near schools has been tried for years without denting childhood obesity, because the premises were never the point. The infrastructure that can put a burger on a doorstep in thirty minutes can put fresh food there too. A government serious about obesity would harness that network rather than tax it, and treat one of Britain's few homegrown digital success stories as a partner in the fight rather than the next convenient villain.
