Is this a Butch Cassidy showdown for UPFs?
If you’ve ever watched the classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you’ll instantly remember the iconic final scene. Holed up inside a building in a small Bolivian mining town, our heroes have taken a hit, they’re low on ammo but up for a fight, ready to take on the local police who’re surrounding them.
What they don’t know is that it’s not just the police waiting outside for them.
It’s the whole Bolivian army.
It’s a pretty good analogy for what happened with FMCG food brands in the past years. They were focussed on complying with HFSS legislation that went live in January. It was a contained fight, one they had strategies and tactics for but as soon as the legislation came into effect, they were ambushed by the UPF narrative, with various campaigners calling for broader regulation and the government publicly mulling switching to a new nutrient profiling model and bringing in even greater restrictions.
The signals were there. Parliamentary mentions of UPF have buried those of HFSS. Compared to 2022, HFSS mentions have collapsed by 72% while UPF discussions have exploded by 275%, signalling a fundamental shift in how the government sees unhealthy food.
Brands can no longer reformulate their way out of a regulatory environment that now views the very nature of processing as a threat to public health. Rather than specific products or portfolios, entire businesses are now caught in this categorisation.
Consumer awareness of UPF converts to avoidance with brutal efficiency. Our research shows that for every 11 people who learn the term, 10 conclude UPFs cannot be healthy, and 8 say they should be avoided. That's a 73% conversion rate from awareness to rejection.
And UPF search volume has skyrocketed on Google 1,400% since 2021, with the UK over-indexing at 4.3x the rate of the US.
Rather than a gradual change in preference, the UPF narrative is creating fast-forming beliefs, and beliefs don’t wait for regulation to start changing behaviour. Coupled with government direction and industry bodies that appear to be sitting on their hands, this trajectory is setting the stage for a structural shock that brands can’t ignore.
The film ends on a sepia freeze-frame of Paul Newman and Robert Redford running out of the building, guns raised and firing.
But we know what the outcome is.
Without a rethink in approach, how many food brands are facing the same fate?
