Action on Sugar raises 79 fingers to WH Smith’s meal deal health vacuum

I wrote last week that it would not be long before the Scottish government’s proposed ban on HFSS promotions saw pressure build in the rest of the UK for similar action.

In fact, five whole days is all it took before Action on Sugar (AOS) produced its latest hall of shame - this time a survey exposing the amount of sugar in supermarket meal deals.

To be fair, this is the latest in a whole string of identikit surveys by that particular campaign body, which has become the Sam Allardyce of pressure groups: you know exactly what is coming but its tactics are very hard to defend against.

This time AOS researchers found some supermarket meal deals contain as much as 30 teaspoons of sugar, or four times an adult’s daily recommended amount.

Top of the pile came a WH Smith combination of a sandwich, Mountain Dew Citrus Blast 500ml drink and bag of Skittles Crazy Sours, a combination that delivered a whopping 30 teaspoons of sugar.

Comfort snacking mode

Handily, they were able to break that down as the equivalent of 79 chocolate fingers. It’s pretty hard to imagine the average person getting through that, even in full autumn misery comfort snacking mode.

WH Smith has since launched a spirited defence of its meal deal policy, telling The Grocer the example mentioned would account for, wait for it, 0.004% of all meal deals sold. There are mathematicians on both sides of the debate, it would appear.

Yet even if that’s true, its position is not exactly strong. As I discovered myself prior to this research paper this particular retailer does not offer a single healthy snack with its meal deals. In fact I was told this in no uncertain terms when I asked exactly that to a very fed up and tired looking sales assistant, obviously low on her vitamin c levels.

This, surely, is an example of a retailer just asking for trouble. WH Smith can talk as much as it likes about all the millions of water bottles it sells. But how difficult is it to include a range of healthier items in those promotions? Any at all would be a start.

Shop-and-go trend

This has all the echoes of the guilt lanes saga when retailers were so slow to act. But perhaps this time there is even more ammunition against them because meal deals have become such a ubiquitous feature of the shop-and-go trend.

It is interesting, then, to see that the BRC, whose subtle changes in policy stance of course reflect the position of the big supermarkets, has said it would actually welcome “proportionate” measures from the government to tackle promotions, with the proviso that there should also be moves to tackle the gut-busting menus on offer in the out-of-home sector.

So here emerge at least two measures that the government can take to show to campaigners it is serious about tackling obesity beyond its heavy reliance on PHE’s reformulation programme.

Why not ban, as AOS urges, HFSS products from meal deals at the front of store? And, as the BRC suggests, start thinking about the blindingly obvious need for regulation of the countless takeaways whose ‘health’ lineups make WH Smith look a saint by comparison? As unpalatable as the Scottish government’s HFSS promotions ban is, voluntary initiatives are not going to work.