Food and drink companies use a range of marketing tactics to promote their products to children, ranging from traditional television adverts to websites and social networks such as Facebook. The products promoted are almost always high in fat, sugar and /or salt, with marketing for healthy food being rare.
This marketing contradicts all the messages about healthy eating children receive, encouraging unhealthy eating habits, which are likely to continue into adulthood, undermining their ability to choose better food and their parents’ efforts to feed them healthily.
In addition, some advertisers take advantage of children’s fears, for example by implying that they will be more popular, sporty or happier if they consume the advertised products. The use of sports stars to promote unhealthy products, such as Wayne Rooney’s promotion for Coca-Cola, is a good example of this.
A review of food promotion to children on behalf of the Food Standards Agency shows that it works directly by influencing children’s food preferences, and also – more powerfully – indirectly by influencing what family and friends consider to be a ‘normal’ diet.
It has been shown that advertisements affect food choices at both brand and category level, so a Burger King burger advert is likely not only to make a person more likely to buy a branded Burger King burger over another brand, but also more likely to buy a burger per se.
Given the crisis in children’s diet, it is vitally important that children are persuaded to eat more - not less - healthily. The Children’s Food Campaign believes it is wrong to allow the food industry to undermine the efforts of parents who are trying hard to persuade children to change their eating habits by marketing unhealthy products for financial gain.
We challenge the worst junk food marketing to children that we see – in 2010 we put Kellogg’s on the spot when they started suggesting that Coco Pops would make a good after-school snack. [link to https://www.sustainweb.org/childrensfoodcampaign/coco_pops/]
But we can’t keep up with the marketing power of the food industry - which is why we’re calling on the Government to take action.
Find out more – what needs to be done?
Children's Food Campaign: Campaigning for policy changes so that all children can easily eat sustainable and healthy food.
