Dietitians Week is 8-12 June is led by the British Dietetic Association (BDA) and provides an opportunity to promote the profession nationally and even globally.
The Junk Free Checkouts campaign challenges supermarkets to act on long-running customer concern and permanently remove unhealthy snacks from all of their checkouts and queuing areas.
Campaign achievements
On 1st January 2014, no supermarket had yet made a commitment to remove sweets and chocolates from all of their checkouts and across all store formats. A year later, three supermarkets have not only made such a commitment, but implemented it too. Tesco, Lidl and Aldi – with a combined market share of 37.5% - have all gone ‘junk free’ at their checkouts, replacing confectionery with a range of healthier alternatives.
The Junk Free Checkouts campaign - harnessing the power not just of the Children's Food Campaign but of the British Dietetic Association, Slimming World and the British Dental Association - has been instrumental in making this happen. The campaign worked with Lidl to enable them to progress from a trial of one ‘healthy till’ per store through to becoming the first supermarket to do it store-wide. The campaign also strengthened the company’s policy to ensure there were no seasonal exceptions and to develop a model for deciding which healthier items should be stocked instead.
Tesco, the dominant player in the industry, announced in May 2014 that it would adopt a similar policy. The campaign’s focus on the discrepancy between what supermarkets were doing in their larger stores and in their convenience store formats helped influence Tesco’s decision. Aldi has also followed Lidl’s lead, and the British Dietetic Association has been working closely with them on selecting healthier alternatives for sale at checkouts.
Whilst, after Tesco’s move, the dominos have not yet all fallen – as the campaign had hoped – other supermarkets, like Morrisons, Waitrose and M&S, are starting to make improvements to what they sell and promote at their tills.
The campaign’s effect on Government has been marked. In 2013 the public health minister vacillated about whether what was sold at the checkouts was any concern of hers. Now Lidl, Tesco and Aldi’s healthy checkouts are held up by her department as the paragon for companies’ involvement in the Responsibility Deal.
But checkouts are also a highly visible symbol of how voluntary measures will never involve all supermarkets (let alone WHSmith or Superdrug) or bring about the wholesale change needed. So the campaign continues, and is now being used to drive progress on strengthening the wider rules governing marketing less healthy food to children.
Go to www.junkfreecheckouts.org.uk and what you can do to help make checkouts junk free.
Children's Food Campaign: Campaigning for policy changes so that all children can easily eat sustainable and healthy food.
