CASH heaps the pressure on suppliers with sugar switch

It’s an unhappy new year for sugar, already branded “the new tobacco ” by some scientists. The World Health Organization is reportedly planning to halve its recommended intake for sugar, while journalists and celebrities denounced it extensively. A Radio 4 documentary this week even discussed whether it is as “addictive as cocaine” and should be classed as a “toxic additive” and “metabolic danger”. Others putting the boot into sugar in the post-festive period include former Australian Cosmo editor Sarah Wilson, plugging her new book I Quit Sugar, The Sunday Times dragged out Gloria Hunniford as a sugar-free exponent, while Chris Evans vowed to give up on Twitter.

As industry executives await a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, currently in production, that promises to lift the lid on sugar, potentially more significant is a decision by Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) - traditionally focused on the UK’s world-leading efforts to reduce salt consumption - to make sugar its big new battleground.

Its Action on Sugar campaign , supported by medical figures from around the world, slams the UK for its lack of a co-ordinated approach to obesity and targets what it claims are the “huge and unnecessary amounts of sugar added to our food and soft drinks ”. Its “name and shame” table (see box for examples) exposes what group chairman Professor Graham MacGregor believes are “shocking” sugar levels .

Action on Sugar calls for moves to gradually reduce the amount of added sugar in food and drink by setting targets across all foods containing added sugar, claiming a 20% to 30% reduction would be “easily achievable” in three to five years. The result, it predicts, would be a 100kcal/day reduction in intake on average, more for those particularly prone to obesity. MacGregor also describes the Responsibility Deal pledge on calorie reduction as “completely ineffective”, and laments the departure of health minister Anna Soubry, who he says had been won round to the idea of target-setting for sugar levels before she was replaced in the hot seat by Jane Ellisson.

“She was very enthusiastic about it. It’s a tragedy she left,” he adds.

With CASH joining a growing band of organisations calling for action, the industry has struggled for a satisfactory response. British Soft Drinks Association director general Gavin Partington claims 60% of soft drinks contain no added sugar.

And a year ago suppliers including GSK, AG Barr and Britvic joined Coca-Cola and PepsiCo as signatories to a Responsibility Deal pledge to slash calories in their leading drinks by up to 10%, promising to do so over the next two years. In a further Responsibility Deal pledge in June, 26 suppliers and retailers , including PepsiCo, Mars and Premier Foods , committed to support front-of-pack labelling. And though Coca-Cola was a notable absentee, in March last year it launched a major ad campaign urging consumers to burn off the calories in drinks by doing more exercise or switching to lower or zero-calorie alternatives. Next week CCE will continue the drive with a new heavyweight brand campaign and limited-edition pack design for its zero-sugar and zero-calorie Coke Zero.

The soft drinks industry has been under particular strain. Tesco has privately described industry efforts to reduce sugar in soft drinks as weak (The Grocer, 9 November), and while CEO Philip Clarke reportedly lobbied the government to “level the playing field” in foodservice industry, this week Tesco unveiled a new healthy living range across over 230 products lines, which includes increased use of sweeteners like stevia.

In the meantime, the CASH war on sugar could embarrass the voluntary approach favoured by the government just as its latest campaign gets under way. Change4Life Smart Swaps, backed by TV ads, claims an average family could cut up to three-quarters of a 1kg bag of sugar over the four-week run but the temporary blitz on healthy promotions is far from the structured process of sugar removal now being demanded.

So how will suppliers react? While investing millions in developing better-tasting healthier options (see p6), there will be no kneejerk decisions.

“We had a 10-year continuity with the FSA and with the DH where there has been a very strong focus on salt reduction, fat reduction and more recently on calories,” says one leading supplier source.

“Companies have invested huge sums in tackling these issues. Now we’ve got the sugar curveball, which has received disproportionate coverage, and all of a sudden industry should be reacting to some pretty iffy science?

“We have a situation now where there are documentary makers desperately scurrying around try to find people to spill the beans on what’s going on with sugar and the words we can expect to be hearing are words like toxic and addictive. Yet the fact is there is a lot of snake-oil science out there and for every one Robert Lustig [the controversial US scientist, who claimed last year in his book Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar that sugar not fat was the biggest cause of obesity] there are 10 pieces of work that contradict it.”

Amounts of sugars per portion of some well-known food and drink products:

Source: Action on Sugar