The food industry plays a central role in shaping our food environments, influencing what and how much the nation eats. With UK consumers increasingly requesting that retailers support their desire to eat healthier, Asda’s Creating Change for Better strategy promotes healthy and sustainable diets through its Better Lives pillar.

To support this strategy, Nesta and Asda are collaborating on a health innovation partnership to invest in ambitious projects that deliver significant health benefits. Over two years, the partnership will work to develop Asda’s health strategy, identify high-potential health interventions, conduct exploratory research to de-risk interventions, design, implement and evaluate live trials, and scale successful interventions across the business. The ultimate goal is to meet the needs of customers and colleagues while supporting Asda’s ambitions for profitable growth and improved customer health.

This project aims to help remove barriers to health and wellbeing for Asda customers by making healthier eating more available, affordable, accessible and attractive. This will include identifying and testing interventions that align customer health goals with business profitability and growth in order to make customer health a central business objective and showcase the benefits of doing so to the industry. Additionally, Nesta hopes to increase understanding of the retail environment in order to design and advocate for more evidence-based, feasible and impactful policy.

Rising rates of obesity in the UK are a major public health concern. Efforts to curb this trend in the form of interventions that focus on individual responsibility have had limited success and obesity rates in the UK have doubled since 1990. But while the food industry has the power to promote environments that encourage healthy shifts in customer purchases and consumption, it faces challenges in achieving health-related commercial goals. These include a lack of buy-in across organisations, limited staff capacity, and less expertise in designing and evaluating innovative health initiatives.

At the same time, a majority of UK adults agree that retailer-led health interventions are acceptable and effective, including food reformulation, positioning in shops, restricting advertising, suggesting healthier swaps, and restricting promotions. Nesta aims to work with Asda to identify high-potential health initiatives, conduct exploratory research to de-risk the initiatives, build health innovation capacity for staff, design, implement and evaluate live trials, and publicise learnings. This will hopefully shift promotional activity towards healthier choices and make healthy food more accessible and affordable, leading to healthier eating habits and reduced obesity rates.

Nesta will work with Asda on four main phases of work.

• Research and explore interventions that align with strategic goals to improve customer health and build trust whilst furthering business growth.
• Design and test health-based interventions with customers and experts that work well in stores or online and maintain profitability.
• Implement and evaluate large-scale trials that improve customer health, foster customer loyalty, and attract new business.
• Scale interventions that show positive impacts on customer health and business value and disseminate successes.

As the project gets underway, we will continue to update this page with more details.