Regulator clears Arla Foods’ acquisition of Volac Whey Nutrition

The Food Foundation’s annual State of the Nation’s Food Industry report, published today, has found that:

• Just 5 companies (Haribo, Mars, Mondelez, PepsiCo, Kellog’s) are responsible for over 80 per cent of TV ads for snacks and confectionary aired before the watershed, despite all of them claiming not to advertise to children
• Almost a third (30 per cent) of major UK restaurant chains serve main meals where over half of the options are concerningly high in salt
• Almost one in five supermarket multibuy offers are on meat and dairy products, with half of these offers on processed meat (10.6 per cent of all offers) despite the known health risks of consuming too much processed meat
• Only one in four major UK food businesses has a healthy sales target and discloses data on the healthiness of their sales
• Restaurant chains and fast-food outlets are the least transparent sector by some way, having made no progress since last year in disclosing healthy sales data or setting targets to improve the healthiness of menus
• Global food giants Mondelez, Mars and Coca-Cola still have no clear explicit board-level accountability for nutrition
• Food industry representatives and their trade associations met with Defra ministers a total of 1,377 times between 2020 and 2023. This is over 40 times more meetings than those held between food NGOs and Defra ministers

The report, published annually by The Food Foundation, analyses data across an array of sources to build up a revealing picture of the UK’s food system. The findings show that currently the food environment, from the food being advertised to us, to the food that dominates menus when we eat out, to the price promotions being offered to us in supermarkets, is relentlessly pushing consumers to make unhealthy choices.