Broken Plate Report
The Food Foundation Broken Plate Report 2022 - The State of the Nation's Food System
The Food Foundation have just published the latest edition of their annual flagship 'Broken Plate' report, revealing the health of our food system and its impact on our lives.
The Broken Plate | Food Foundation
The Report provided annual statistics on key metrics aimed at making healthier options more appealing, more affordable and more available. Action on Salt and Sugar have collaborated with the Food Foundation for the fourth year in a row, assessing the nutritional profile of breakfast cereals, and more recently yogurts, with packaging that appeals to children.
For the fourth year running, we have been monitoring the nutritional content of food products aimed for child consumption, and calling for reduced levels of salt and sugar and improved marketing practices. Evidence shows that bright, animated packaging that appeals to children can influence food preferences and consumption, which remains an issue as these products often contain many added sugars.
Supermarket own label cereals score nutritionally more favourably, with greater reductions in both salt and sugar being made by retailers. This demonstrates that there are indeed technical solutions to reformulation, with great success. But whilst this is promising news, it is the branded cereals that often take pride of place in our kitchen cupboards. Kellogg’s are the most popular cereal brand in the UK, and represent nearly a third of the global retail value, with Nestle and Weetabix following close behind. Reformulation of these more popular products will have the greatest impact on public health, but unfortunately many are falling short of the recommendations.
A level playing field is urgently needed to give our future generations the best possible start in life. We need more responsible marketing of products to prevent pester power of unhealthy foods, coupled with continual reductions in salt, sugar and saturated fat, and increased fibre. Now more than ever we need to provide children with healthy affordable food that will help them thrive, not set them on course for health problems later down the line.
For more detail on our metrics please read our Broken Plate 2022 [PDF 1,176KB]
