The healthy food standard builds on Nesta’s proposal to set health targets for large retailers to improve the overall healthiness of their food sales. In this report, we used more recent 2024 food purchasing data (versus 2021) and a more refined modelling approach to make our impact estimates and recommendations as robust as possible.

Our updated modelling further strengthens confidence in our original findings. If all 11 large retailers could achieve our recommended healthiness target, this could reduce the prevalence of adult and childhood obesity by around 20%. Retailers could meet the target by making generally smaller changes to their food portfolio than we previously estimated, and meaningfully improve the healthiness of shopping baskets with barely noticeable changes for consumers.

We are more confident than ever that the healthy food standard remains the most impactful policy option to tackle obesity. However, the government must act swiftly to ensure mandatory reporting and targets are introduced within this Parliament.

What’s in the report

• We continue to recommend a health target based on a sales-weighted average converted nutrient profiling model (cNPM) score, which captures the overall healthiness of a retailer’s sales. We believe this score gives retailers flexibility in how they improve the healthiness of products (such as by targeting different nutrients like salt, sugar, and calories) and helps incentivise action across a wide range of their sales.
• We modelled different ways in which retailers could meet a health target with marginal to no impact on their revenue (±0.1% change): through selling more of healthier products and less of unhealthier products, as well as improving the recipes of unhealthy foods via reformulation.
• We found that all 11 large retailers can meet a cNPM target of 69 (slightly better than the current best performer in 2024) by making practically feasible and revenue-neutral shifts. The sector as a whole (across all 11 retailers) could reach this target by sales-shifting or reformulating around 5% of all food products.
• We found that if all 11 major retailers achieve a health target of 69, this could reduce the prevalence of adult and childhood obesity by around 20% in Great Britain, in line with our previous estimates.
• Our analysis illustrating the types of changes that consumers might see in a typical weekly food shop suggests it is possible for consumers to make small but meaningful healthy swaps without increasing their food spend, even in households on lower incomes.

Findings and recommendations

We are more confident than ever that the healthy food standard remains the most impactful policy option currently on the table for tackling obesity. However, time is running out to deliver the policy. The government must act swiftly to introduce legislation required to implement the healthy food standard, including both mandatory reporting and targets, as soon as possible and within this Parliament to prevent the potential impact of the policy being lost to dilution and delay.

The government should consider starting to implement the policy within large supermarket retailers, which account for over 80% of the calories purchased in Great Britain. We recommend that this mandatory target is set at a level that is achievable and pragmatic for large retailers, while still driving meaningful improvements in population health. Our analysis shows that a target of 69 cNPM strikes this balance.

We would like to thank Anish Chacko, John Barber, Ryu Matsuura, Clare Brennan and Patricia Beloe for their invaluable contribution in shaping this work.