State of The Nation's Food Industry report
State of The Nation's Food Industry report is launched today. The report looks at the progress UK food businesses are making in supporting the transition towards healthier and more sustainable diets, and what needs to happen next.
The Food Foundation highlights how the UK food system isn’t working. Addressing four key metrics covering: standards, availability, affordability and appeal, this year’s analysis shows that while some businesses are making progress there is still a huge amount of work to be done. Going further, faster, urgently requires government regulation to shift the market as a whole.
Virtually all major food businesses target set for net zero and Scope 3 emissions and report on their impact. Should a similar approach be taken for health? Just 5 out of the 36 major UK food businesses benchmarked have moved to disclose data or set new targets for increasing sales of healthy and sustainable food since last year.
We caught up with Nicky Martin, Director of Nutrition and Wellbeing, about the report and how The Food Federation highlight the work within our market as integral to the health of the nation.
“We are proud of making progress, but we know there is much more to do. At Compass we have the size and scale to create significant impact and we now need to accelerate our plans significantly to ensure the highest level of progress continues.
In the second year of reporting Compass has recorded further reduction in salt, fat and saturate fat, alongside procuring and serving more vegetables.
- Almost 88% of Compass recipes are low or medium in fat – this equates to >21,000 recipes.
- Over 93% of recipes are low or medium in salt.
- 94% of dishes are low or medium in sugar.
- 4% increase in veg portions procurement compared with 2022 (80g portions)
Having made significant progress in our reporting on the sales-based data for vegetables it is great to see that we featured in the top five companies who made significant progress since last year in disclosing transparent data and setting targets to support sales of more healthy and sustainable food. This is alongside overall targets, which will see less than 10% of its dishes being high in saturated fat and less than 5% of its dishes being high in salt by 2030, while also increasing positive nutrients, embedding behavioural science, and educating customers, clients, and its own people.
It is important to target set and be transparent and as part of our industry-leading Transition Plan these targets will focus our efforts in making progress quicker in improving the health and environment of the nation.
We alongside Lidl are the only companies with targets to increase sales of plant-based protein in proportion to animal-based protein. We maintain our target to switch from animal based towards plant-based proteins. Our chefs work creatively on new recipes and reformulating the 24,000 existing ones to ensure we are on track with this target. In 2023 The Food Foundation recognised our efforts in vegetable reporting for the Peas Please Campaign.
As the UK’s largest food and services provider, we have a duty to provide access to healthy and nutritious meals.
This report shows that our work is gaining traction in meeting our overall targets, set for 2030. We have achieved a huge amount through menu reformulation, and we continue to make steady progress. We have a team of dedicated experts leading this agenda driving further innovation in this area.”
For more information:
Plating Up Progress | Food Foundation
