In 2021, Action on Sugar and Feedback Global were awarded funding by the Esmée Fairburn Foundation to challenge the UK’s excessive supply and consumption of sugar, addressing the twin goals of improving public health and planetary health. Find out more here.

As part of this project, our new report exposes how UK supermarkets are driving high sugar sales. 

• The overconsumption of sugar is endangering public health, placing pressure on an already-overburdened NHS, using prime agricultural land, and damaging our soils which threatens our ability to grow healthy food.  
• Despite efforts to reformulate certain products with less sugar under the voluntary Sugar Reduction Programme 2015-2020, supermarkets’ total sugar sales have increased over the last 5+ years. This highlights the need for stronger policies to reduce overall sugar sales and consumption. 
• We surveyed the UK’s 10 biggest supermarkets to find out if their policies are fit for the task of reducing total sugar sales, finding that nine out of ten UK supermarkets lack any policies to measure total sugar sales across all products. 
• We are calling on supermarkets to commit to publicly disclosing and reducing overall sugar sales by 50% by 2025 and by two-thirds by 2030, and for Government to drive this by implementing mandatory targets. 

Sugar rush: How UK supermarkets drive high sugar sales [PDF 1,276KB]

Policy Brief: How UK supermarkets drive high sugar sales [PDF 125KB]