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bidfood.co.uk/sustainability
Our principles
Our communities Awards
Offering healthier choices
Salt reduction
In the latter part of 2020, Public Health England
(PHE) issued the government's fifth set of
voluntary salt reduction targets for industry to
achieve by 2024. These targets are based around
the 2017 targets with revisions made where it's
believed that there's further scope
for reducing salt.
In addition, the nutrition standards for the
Government Buying Standards have been
updated and now procured products from certain
categories must also adhere to the new salt
targets by 2024.
We recognise that achieving the public health goal
of consuming no more than 6g of salt per person
per day will necessitate further action across the
whole industry, government, NGOs and individuals.
As a result, we've updated our salt reduction policy
to commit to the new government salt targets.
New own brand products should aim to meet or be
below the average salt value for their respective
category and must not exceed the maximum.
In June 2022, 39% of own brand products
met the average salt targets and 69%
were below the maximum salt targets.
Sugar reduction
As part of the government's childhood obesity
strategy, a voluntary sugar reduction programme
was initiated by Public Health England (PHE), to
challenge industry to reduce overall sugars across
a range of products that contribute to children's
sugar intakes. These ambitious targets set out for
industry to reduce the sugar in their products by
20% by 2020.
We've worked towards reducing sugar
consumption, whilst respecting choice and
maintaining product satisfaction for our customers.
At the time, we engaged with PHE on their sugar
reduction programme to develop a suitable sugar
management strategy for us. We reviewed our own
brand foods from the applicable PHE categories
and we reformulated the most sugary products,
that also had the highest sales volume, to make
sure we had the greatest impact in reducing the
sugar being used in our own brand products.
We've not only reformulated own brand products,
but we've enabled customers to make informed
choices, by developing tools such as our traffic
light report available through our advice centre.
This report nutritionally profiles all our own brand
and branded products against certain standards,
such as PHE's sugar reduction targets, the sugar
tax (for soft drinks), or against front of pack traffic
light labelling.
Calorie labelling
Earlier this year, the government introduced
mandatory calorie labelling for large businesses
in the out of home sector that required calorie
information per serving to be displayed at the
point of choice for consumers. To support our
customers with this transition, we created a
comprehensive Making Sense of Calorie Labelling
Guide, which detailed which businesses were in
scope and what they needed to do to comply
with the new legislation. We also created a range
of tools to support with this, such as a podcast
series and a recipe and menu planning tool
on our online shop, Bidfood Direct. Customers
can create and manage recipes based on their
agreed product range and pricing. The MyRecipes
tool calculates the calorie content, nutritional
information per serve and per 100g which can be
downloaded to be used to create compliant labels.
More information on this area can be found here.
Click here to read more about our
sugar reduction achievements