The healthy food standard will introduce mandatory data reporting and health targets for large food businesses. Inspired by a Nesta proposal, it was announced by the UK government in 2025 as part of the 10 Year Health Plan for England. By incentivising businesses to sell healthier food to improve their overall health score, the policy could cut obesity by around a fifth without driving up costs for consumers or businesses. 

Around 2 in 3 people live with excess weight or obesity, and levels of childhood obesity are now among the highest in Europe. It’s one of the root causes of many other health issues, from cancer to diabetes. But through small changes, the healthy food standard could make a significant health impact.

The healthy food standard will mandate large food businesses to report on the healthiness of their sales, and then reach a minimum target for selling healthier food. 

Businesses can use whatever tools at their disposal to hit the target, using tactics like product promotions and placement. In supermarkets, that might mean putting healthier ready meals on offer or giving more shelf space to cereals that have a bit less sugar. These are well-used industry practices that simply need to be aligned with health. 

While reporting on the healthiness of sales is important, hitting a target for improvement is what will ultimately get more healthy food on their shelves and in our diets. Targets must be mandatory because voluntary initiatives have been repeatedly tried and have proven insufficient to tackle the problem.

The healthy food standard will also cover large out-of-home food businesses. Health targets for such businesses could reduce obesity by around 2.5% over three years. In order to set effective targets for this sector, we first need the right data, so the government should expedite mandatory data collection first, to inform effective target setting in future.

We have seen almost 700 policies fall short of tackling obesity. At best, these interventions - education, information provision, physical activity or voluntary measures - have been insufficient in scale. At worst, potentially impactful interventions like advertising regulations have been delayed and diluted. 

But obesity is preventable. The healthy food standard offers a new path forward by tackling the root cause of obesity: how food is marketed, promoted and sold to us. This is known as the food environment. 

When Nesta modelled the impact of over thirty obesity policies, health targets were found to make the greatest impact on health while also being cost-effective to deliver. Setting ambitious health targets could lead to around 3 million fewer people in the UK living with obesity, save society around £17 billion every year and help the government achieve policy goals like halving the gap in healthy life expectancy. 

The healthy food standard is a vital step towards our mission goal of halving obesity. With government and industry commitment, we can finally shift focus to the food environment, end decades of policy failure and turn the tide on the nation’s health for good.