Price promotions are a distinctive feature of the British food retail environment. In fact, they account for 34% of take-home food and drink expenditure. We know there is a link between promotional purchasing behaviour, obesity and less healthy diets and that high promotional shoppers are 28% more likely to be obese. According to Cancer Research, shoppers who regularly use promotions buy around a fifth more items that are high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) than low promotional shoppers. The government has acknowledged the role of price promotions in contributing to high obesity levels in the UK and new location and volume promotion restrictions for HFSS products are currently being reviewed for implementation in October 2022.

Nesta partnered with Oxford University to generate new evidence by carrying out analysis of a unique data source consisting of information on food and drinks available from six major supermarket websites (foodDB).

Price promotions are a potential policy lever to encourage healthier eating and reduce obesity. There is good evidence around the relationship between price promotions, sale volumes and what people actually put in their shopping baskets. A large amount of literature has also considered whether price promotions are more prevalent for less healthy food; several studies have found evidence in support of this hypothesis but of course the prevalence of price promotions depends on the context, such as geographical location or type of retailer. Until now, evidence has been gathered from small samples, retailers with large market share and in limited time frames, which makes it difficult to gather a complete picture of the evolving British food retail environment.

For Nesta to identify the most promising settings where we could make a difference, we needed to get a more detailed understanding of the nature and distribution of price promotions. We wanted to understand what types of price promotions are most prevalent, the pattern and frequency of promotions, the size of discount and how all of these features vary across food categories, levels of healthiness and retailers.

This project is the first stage of a series of activities that will lead to Nesta coming up with interventions that could change the promotional landscape to encourage healthier purchasing. Although government policies have mostly focused on restricting price promotions, at Nesta we want to adopt a holistic approach and consider price promotions as a lever to enable retailers to increase the healthiness of the food they sell.

Our partners at Oxford University have collected product level information from websites of six major UK retailers since 2017. foodDB is a new and unique database with greater detail (or temporal granularity for sector experts) than any other food composition database in the UK. It collects information on over 100,000 products per week, including details about nutritional composition, price and whether the product was promotional or not.

We analysed 12 months’ worth of foodDB data (January-December 2021). With this data we built a framework to measure features of price promotions to assess them within the context of the UK government’s proposed volume and location restrictions and to suggest interventions that are not included in the upcoming legislation. Nesta’s ambition is to use the findings from this analysis to design interventions that leverage price promotions to encourage healthier purchasing and eating habits.