Regulatory Vandalism: How new UK food health scores penalise consumers and undermine industry investment
The casualties are already mounting. PepsiCo invested £13 million into its Coventry site to reformulate the entire Doritos portfolio, slashing salt and fat by 18% and 14% respectively after years of meticulous work. In September 2024, Mondelez declared its entire Belvita soft bakes range completely non-HFSS, having reduced sodium by up to 56%. Premier Foods cut sugar by more than 40% and saturates by 70% in its Mr Kipling Delicious & Light slices.
These are the poster children of the food industry's reformulation programme. They represent hundreds of millions of pounds in investment and countless hours of research and development. And now, barely a week after the delayed HFSS advertising ban finally came into force, the government has announced it will switch to an updated nutrient profiling model that will render all this effort worthless. These reformulated products will be banned from television advertising, online promotion, and in-store location and multibuy deals, just as if they had never been improved at all.
For senior leaders navigating regulation, the government might sell this as policy refinement, but it’s nothing more than regulatory vandalism dressed up as public health intervention.
The Shift in Nutrient Profiling
The impact assessment accompanying Health Secretary Wes Streeting's 10-year NHS masterplan reveals the government's intention to adopt the 2018 nutrient profiling model that was shelved by the previous Conservative government precisely because of its enormous impact on the food industry. The new rules would bring thousands more products under advertising and promotions bans, including cereals, fruit juices, yoghurts and smoothies. Even Innocent's orange with bits pure juice, which provides vitamin C, folates and potassium and counts as one of a consumer's five a day, would be caught in the net.
Behind this dramatic escalation stands Nesta, the innovation foundation that has been instrumental in helping the government draw up its mandatory reporting and targets framework. Nesta claims its plans could reduce obesity by nearly a quarter and save the NHS £20 billion a year. These are precisely the kind of headline-grabbing figures that appeal to politicians desperate to demonstrate they are tackling the NHS crisis without actually increasing funding.
But Nesta's optimistic projections rest on assumptions that industry insiders say demonstrate profound naivety about how food retail actually works. Andrea Martinez-Inchausti, deputy director of food at the British Retail Consortium, was blunt: "Those retailers that have already voluntarily begun reporting on the health of their products have found it to be an absolutely mammoth task." She warned it would cost supermarkets "tens of millions" of pounds and take several years before adequate systems were in place.
Industry Opposition and the Lack of Public Relevance
While Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Asda currently produce annual reports on the healthiness of their sales, this voluntary exercise is a far cry from the granular, product-by-product analysis that mandatory targets would require. Nesta proposes using a sales-weighted average score based on the Nutrient Profile Model across companies' entire portfolios, with a target of 69 or less. In practice, this would require a fundamental reshaping of product ranges and consumer purchasing patterns, with verification and auditing systems that simply do not yet exist.
This brings us to a critical division that the government seems determined to ignore. While the major supermarkets have cautiously supported the principle of mandatory reporting, food manufacturers are united in their opposition. The Food and Drink Federation's chief scientific officer Kate Halliwell warned that "businesses made their investments based on a clear, government-defined standard and have made significant progress." FDF members' products now contain a third less salt and sugar and a quarter fewer calories compared to 2015. She emphasised that "ensuring a stable regulatory environment is the best way to support continued progress."
The Advertising Association was equally forthright, describing the proposed changes as "deeply frustrating" and pointing out that businesses have invested heavily in reformulating products and adapting campaigns over months, if not years. To change the rules now, when the advertising restrictions only came into force in January, leaves businesses in the lurch with insufficient time to prepare.
What makes this regulatory overreach particularly galling is its timing. The government claims to prioritise economic growth yet proposes measures that will directly undermine investment in British food manufacturing. Why would any company invest millions in reformulation when the government has demonstrated it will simply move the goalposts? The updated NPM model demands levels of sugar reduction that industry experts say are "simply not achievable" without disastrous changes to taste profiles or enormous additional investment that many businesses simply cannot afford.
The Real Cost of Regulatory Chaos
The government's projections that the updated model could reduce calorie intake by an additional 30 calories per day, potentially preventing 170,000 cases of childhood obesity and 940,000 cases of adult obesity, deserve scrutiny. They assume that restricting advertising and promotions will fundamentally alter what people choose to eat, rather than simply shifting where and how they buy the same products. They assume that healthier alternatives will be readily available, affordable and acceptable to consumers. And they assume that businesses will continue to invest in the British market despite the regulatory uncertainty. None of these assumptions is safe.
The out-of-home sector, which contributes a large proportion of daily calories for many consumers, has been given more time to develop data collection systems because even the biggest takeaways and restaurant chains lack the monitoring capabilities of supermarkets. Yet Nesta and the government want to impose targets on retailers immediately, creating a two-tier system that will distort competition and potentially drive consumers towards less regulated channels.
The tragedy is that this intervention may actually undermine public health goals. By destroying the business case for reformulation, the government risks discouraging exactly the kind of incremental improvements that have delivered real results over the past decade. By imposing reporting requirements that will cost tens of millions of pounds, it diverts resources that could be spent on product development. And by focusing obsessively on reformulation and restriction, it ignores the broader determinants of obesity, from sedentary lifestyles to food poverty.
Wes Streeting has said he will ditch the promotions ban if businesses can find other ways of making baskets healthier. But this flexibility is meaningless when the underlying nutrient profiling model keeps shifting. What the food industry needs is regulatory stability, not well-meaning but ultimately counterproductive intervention driven by activist organisations with limited understanding of commercial realities.
A Recipe for Regulatory Vandalism
The casualties of these policies are not abstract statistics. They are the employees of PepsiCo's Coventry site who worked for years to reformulate Doritos. They are the innovation teams at Mondelez and Premier Foods who delivered healthier products that consumers actually want to buy. And they are the British consumers who will face reduced choice, higher prices and less innovation as businesses scale back their commitment to the UK market.
At this point, it’s clear the momentum behind these measures isn’t being driven by new evidence or operational feasibility. It’s being driven by a set of assumptions about what should work, what ought to be acceptable, and what looks politically defensible. The uncomfortable implication for corporate affairs and communications teams is if those assumptions are now the primary driver of regulatory momentum, then waiting for legislation to respond is no longer a viable strategy. Intervention has to happen earlier, before positions harden, or permanent disadvantage becomes the default.
Before imposing mandatory targets and updating the nutrient profiling model, the government should pause, consult properly with industry and wait to see whether the advertising restrictions that only just came into force actually work. Moving the goalposts is not a public health strategy, it’s a recipe for regulatory chaos that will harm businesses, consumers and ultimately, and the very health outcomes it purports to improve.
