As world leaders and their officials gather in Baku, Azerbaijan to engage in a fortnight of tense climate diplomacy, the real-world impact our food system is having on human health and the environment has been laid bare in a new report.
The ‘State of the nation’s food industry’, produced by the Food Foundation, assessed how leading UK food businesses are shaping the food environment. It found that while some companies are leading the way in championing responsible business practices, progress overall remains far too slow.
For example, the rate at which companies are setting sales-based targets to boost revenues from healthy and sustainable foods has “slowed almost to a standstill”, according to the report, with the casual dining and quick service restaurant sectors in particular having made no progress since last year’s assessment.
Just seven of the 36 major UK food businesses benchmarked have moved to disclose data on healthy, sustainable diets or set new targets for increasing sales of healthy and sustainable food since last year’s report. These include Bidfood and Compass Group UK&I, however the out of home sector as a whole is lagging worryingly behind retail and manufacturing in disclosing data transparently and setting targets for change.
The outlook is more positive when it comes to climate reporting with 34 of the 36 companies assessed having set a target for reaching net-zero and reducing scope 3 emissions. Yet, as sustainability professionals know only too well, target setting is the easy part; the Food Foundation identified an “intention-action gap”, with 42% of businesses not transparently reporting on their progress towards reaching these goals and almost a fifth (17%) having seen their scope 3 emissions increase rather than fall during the past year.
Elsewhere, the report found the majority (58%) of main meals served by the UK’s major restaurant chains contain meat, although this has fallen since last year (62%); none of the 20 UK high street restaurant chains surveyed make their healthier or plant-based kids meal deals the cheapest; and almost a third (30%) of major UK restaurant chains serve main meals where over half of the options exceed 50% of the recommended daily intake of salt.
The Food Foundation also highlighted the problem of low pay in the UK food industry; more than four million people working in the sector currently earn below the real living wage with kitchen and waiting staff particularly affected.
Launching the report during an online webinar, Food Foundation chief executive Anna Taylor said the lack of a regulatory level playing field was holding back companies who want to do the right thing as she urged the government to raise standards for all businesses. Specifically, the Food Foundation wants to see mandatory reporting of health and sustainability data by all large food businesses through the government’s food data transparency partnership (FDTP), a collaborative forum that has been put on ice since Labour came to power.
Three thousand miles away in Baku, UN secretary general António Guterres was making a similar plea for transparency as he called on businesses to develop robust net-zero transition plans before the start of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil next year. Guterres had opened the COP29 conference in typically forthright fashion by describing 2024 as “a masterclass in climate destruction”. UK prime minister Keir Starmer did his best to lift the gloom by announcing a new UK pledge to cut emissions by 81% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels, a target in line with the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee. Starmer, however, dismissed the notion that the government would tell people how to live their lives in pursuit of the goal, including by asking people to eat a little less meat.
We can only assume the prime minister had not been briefed on new evidence showing that dietary change will have to be on the menu if the UK food system is to contribute its fair share of emissions reductions. A new UK food system transition plan, produced by IGD, Wrap and EY, has concluded that supply-side decarbonisation alone will not be sufficient to meet 2030 and 2050 climate targets. The findings are detailed in a separate news story, as is news of a major reusable cup trial kicking off in Scotland, and a call to action from ATNi for food suppliers to move faster on improving the nutritional profile of their products.
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