Why is healthy food so expensive?

Why do you think that supermarkets do so many promotions on healthy foods?

Well, it’s profitable, it drives volume and it drives profits. Ultimately, that is why we need policy intervention that actually restricts that because it’s [retail] a highly competitive sector and unless there are those restrictions and regulations in place that ensures a level playing field for everybody, there will continue to be large amounts of offers on the less healthy foods.

What do you think can be done from a governmental level?

So the first thing is, the government should implement the HFSS volume promotion restriction. The legislation is already there. It was supposed to come into law in October 2023 and instead, it’s been postponed to 2025. That legislation has already gone through. So it would be a fairly swift process of implementing it and we’d like to see the government move to do that quickly.

Do you think this is just a governmental thing or is there an onus on the supermarkets themselves to do this as well?

Definitely. Some supermarkets have already shown really positive leadership. After the government pushed the HFSS volume promotion restrictions back to 2025 Sainsbury’s and Tesco voluntarily said that they would continue to ban HFSS, multi-buys without the government making it a legal requirement to do so. So that was really positive but I think there is much more that the retailers can be doing. We know that most of the supermarkets in the UK now have targets about healthier sales, and increasing the proportion of their sales that are coming from healthier foods as opposed to HFSS products. But if they’re going to meet those targets, really promotional spend also needs to shift away from those HFSS foods and drain us towards healthier foods.

Do you think that supermarkets have an obligation to incentivise people to eat healthier?

That’s an interesting question. We’re a free market economy, aren’t we? But I think certainly there’s an increasing onus on businesses to show responsible leadership. Beyond that, if they’re going to meet health targets or environmental Net Zero targets, then they’re going to need to shift their sales away from HFSS foods and towards more fruit, more veg, more healthier foods.

Is there a particular supermarket that’s better at offering these kinds of promotions on healthy foods?

To be honest when you look at fruit and veg and staple carbohydrates, there’s very little difference across all the retailers. We’re talking tiny decimal points across the sector, we don’t see evidence of many promotions, gearing towards fruit and veg and staple carbohydrates.

How much do you think that the cost of living crisis is having an effect on this?

What’s interesting is that when consumers are polled, they will say we really want promotions on healthier foods. We ran a survey of about 2000 low income households last year, and almost 80% of them said they’d like to see multibuy offers on things like fruit and veg and staple carbohydrates. So we know that customers would like that support from retailers to be able to increase the amount of healthy foods they’re buying. We also know that on a calorie per calorie basis, it’s twice as expensive to buy healthier foods than less healthy foods.

I’m not sure how the cost living crisis has impacted on retailers and I suspect there hasn’t been much of a shift over the past few years in terms of where offers are going, because we certainly haven’t seen much change over the course of time we’ve been monitoring it but we do know that if anything, far more families are struggling to afford the cost of the healthy shopping basket.

So if you say that you found data that says customers want more help on unhealthy foods, why do you think that the supermarket’s aren’t following that market?

I think there’s probably a number of reasons. I think it’s still more profitable to sell more of the less healthy foods. It is worth looking at when customers will often say something, but then when you’re actually in the supermarket, unless the healthy option is the appealing one, the affordable one, the accessible one, unless we make it easy for everybody to make that healthy choice then there’s going to be a behaviour intention gap.

What can other retailers learn to apply to their own promotional activity from this data?

I think there is an opportunity here for somebody to take the lead in terms of placing promotions on healthy foods, but particularly fruit and veg and seasonally those staple carbohydrates, because those are the two food categories where we see the very smallest proportion of offers going. So I think there’s an opportunity there.