Five names — Carlsberg Britvic, Danone North Europe, KP Snacks, Nomad Foods and Premier Foods plc — have put themselves forward as the first movers on healthy food sales reporting, publishing data from next year without waiting to be told to. 

Getting ahead of the curve

Voluntary disclosure ahead of regulation is not a new tactic in this sector, but the scale of the ask here is unusual.

The letter to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care doesn’t just commit five companies to publishing their own figures — it explicitly asks government to build a mandatory system for the whole industry within this parliament. That’s a request for regulation, not just an announcement of self-regulation, and it’s worth reading the two halves of that letter as distinct moves: one voluntary and immediate, one a political ask with a much longer runway.

Behind the letter

The Food and Drink Federation sits behind this announcement. The FDF chief executive Karen Betts frames the initiative’s purpose most clearly. Her description of the group as testing “the best ways to collate and report data to support our broader sector and government in informing any future legislation” suggests the exercise has been designed from the outset to produce a template the rest of the sector can follow, rather than five businesses simply choosing to go first on their own initiative.

The method behind the model

The choice to report against the existing Nutrient Profiling Model, rather than the newer version government has been developing, is the most practical detail in the letter. It’s also the most telling.

The companies are explicit that adopting the newer model would mean building new measurement systems from scratch, and that doing so “would delay reporting.” In other words, speed has been prioritised over waiting for a more up-to-date methodology. That’s a defensible trade-off if the goal is genuinely to move fast — but it does mean the resulting data will be benchmarked against a model built for HFSS advertising rules, not one designed from the ground up for this purpose.

Reading the fine print

To their credit, the signatories don’t pretend this is a finished system. The letter itself flags unresolved questions — how to handle mergers and acquisitions in the data, and how to separate UK-specific figures from global reporting commitments — as reasons more companies haven’t yet joined. Those aren’t small technical footnotes; they’re exactly the kind of edge cases that determine whether a voluntary scheme scales into a workable mandatory one, or stalls once the easy cases are done.

Where this leaves us

Five companies publishing comparable data next year is genuinely useful. It gives government, campaigners and rival manufacturers something concrete to look at, rather than another round of position papers. 

• Rodney Jack, editor, Food & Drink Technology. Keep in touch via email: [email protected] X: @foodanddrinktec or LinkedIn: Food & Drink Technology magazine.