From January 2026, the UK introduced one of the most significant changes to food advertising in a generation: a ban on television adverts for products high in fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) before 9pm, and a complete prohibition on paid HFSS advertising online. The rules cover a wide range of categories — from crisps and confectionery to fast food and sugary drinks — and represent a genuine policy commitment to reducing children's exposure to marketing for nutritionally poor food.
Vitagri welcomes this. The evidence that HFSS advertising influences children's food preferences is well-established, and the scale of the diet-related disease burden in the UK — which Vitagri's Growing Health Report estimates at approximately £268 billion per year — demands bold policy action. Every measure that shifts consumption patterns towards more nutritious food is a step in the right direction.
But the advertising ban, on its own, addresses the demand side of a problem that has deep supply-side roots. And without supply-side reform, it will not be enough.
The Problem with Addressing Only Symptoms
The dominant model of food policy in the UK focuses on what consumers eat and are exposed to. Traffic light labelling tells consumers whether a food is high or low in fat, salt, and sugar. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy taxes manufacturers of sugary drinks. The HFSS advertising ban restricts marketing. All of these are demand-side interventions — they try to change what people buy and eat.
What none of them address is the upstream question: how nutritious is the food being produced in the first place? The HFSS framework defines food quality in terms of what it doesn't contain — not too much fat, not too much sugar, not too much salt. It says nothing about what food should contain: minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, and the hundreds of secondary metabolites that constitute genuine nutritional quality.
A product can be low in fat, sugar, and salt — and thus technically not HFSS — whilst being entirely devoid of the nutrients that support immune function, cognitive development, and chronic disease prevention. The HFSS framework, by design, cannot distinguish between a nutritionally empty food and a genuinely nutritious one.
The Supply-Side Gap
The deeper problem is structural. The UK food system — like most modern food systems — optimises for yield, shelf life, appearance, and cost. These are the metrics that determine what farmers grow, what retailers buy, and what processors manufacture. Nutritional quality does not appear on the scorecard.
As Vitagri documents extensively in the Growing Health Report, the nutritional quality of UK crops has declined significantly over the past five decades — with mineral content down by 6–38% and vitamin concentrations falling measurably across multiple crop types. This is not primarily a consequence of what consumers are eating. It is a consequence of how food is being grown: intensive farming practices that prioritise rapid growth and high yield over the biological processes that create nutritional density.
Banning junk food adverts does not change how potatoes are grown in Lincolnshire or how wheat is produced in East Anglia. It does not create any incentive for a farmer to invest in soil health, cover cropping, or reduced synthetic inputs. It does not give a retailer any commercial reason to source from a farm that produces measurably more nutritious food. The supply chain incentives remain exactly as they were.
What We Need Alongside the Ad Ban
Vitagri's position is that meaningful food system reform requires action on three fronts simultaneously: reducing consumption of nutritionally poor food (which the ad ban addresses), improving the nutritional quality of the food supply (which requires farm-level intervention), and creating the measurement and verification infrastructure that makes improvement visible and rewardable.
The third of these is the most technically challenging — and the least visible in current policy debates. If we cannot measure the nutritional quality of food at the farm level, we cannot reward farmers who produce better food, retailers who source it, or consumers who buy it. We are flying blind.
Vitagri's GroundUp Framework is designed to address this gap directly: a practical, farm-level system for measuring soil health, crop nutritional quality, and the farming practices that produce it — leading to verified claims that can be communicated through the supply chain from field to consumer.
The HFSS advertising ban is a welcome and overdue step. But if the UK government is serious about the £268bn cost of diet-related chronic disease, it needs to go further — and start measuring quality, not just restricting the marketing of what doesn't have it.
Read Vitagri's analysis of the food system quality gap
