As a population, we are consuming more unhealthy food. As a result, obesity in the UK has doubled since 1990 and two-thirds of adults in the UK are now overweight or obese – more than most other European countries. The environments in which we live have a significant impact on what we eat and often lead us towards more unhealthy choices.

The public and political narrative around tackling obesity tends to focus too much on an ‘eat well, do more’ message, placing the burden for change on individuals rather than those with the power to make change: politicians and the food industry. We need to shift this narrative and instead focus on improving the food environment, increasing the availability of healthy food and making the healthy choice the easy choice.

The food industry plays a central role in shaping our food environment, influencing what and how much the nation eats. Therefore, it has the power to improve its offer to consumers and make a significant impact on obesity. The policies and measures put in place by the government inform the food industry's practices and behaviours. However, current commercial and regulatory incentives for shifting the food environment are weak and have not driven the scale of change required to tackle obesity. This has led to retailers, manufacturers and the out-of-home sector taking limited and inconsistent action to improve the healthiness of their portfolios.

We need the government to help level the playing field and create incentives that encourage the whole of the food industry to act. We believe that setting health targets for the industry with robust incentives and penalties would be an effective mechanism to meet this need and drive the industry to take the steps needed to tackle obesity.

In January 2023, we published our Future of food report, in which we identified target food categories for reformulation and recommended organisation-wide targets to improve the healthiness of diets. We then explored options to implement and incentivise health targets across the food sector. The first phase, which focused on retailers, was completed in February 2024. The second phase, which focused on the out-of-home sector, ran until summer 2024.

The retailer phase of this project started by examining the current policy landscape, including existing voluntary target programmes and health commitments already made by the industry. This helped inform the development of our potential target options, recognising the need to balance impact with feasibility, for both business and government.

The second phase, focusing on the out-of-home sector, created a novel dataset (the first of its kind – linking several data sources and enhanced by machine learning models) to help us understand what is happening in the sector. We used this data to produce a comprehensive report on how the out-of-home sector is impacting diets. This data will also be used to design targets for the out-of-home sector aimed at improving health. We will also continue engaging stakeholders across the food system to refine our proposals.

We modelled the potential impact of different target options and estimated their effect on daily calories purchased and future population obesity levels. This highlighted which targets would have the greatest impact on reducing obesity. We outlined detailed options to support policymakers to consider how they could implement, monitor, and enforce targets to maximise impact. We also commissioned an economic assessment of the policy to explore its costs to businesses and consumers. Throughout this project, we engaged with stakeholders across the food system to understand the practical barriers they face in achieving health targets and gathered their views on our proposed target options. Our recommendation for a retailer target is detailed in our policy brief Targeting the health of the nation.