Is the guilt lane still in the dock?

Sensing blood, Radio 4 Today programme presenter James Naughtie went in for the kill. In a savage attack on Asda corporate affairs director Sian Jarvis in October 2012, he declared it was “absolute rubbish” that junk food piled high at supermarket checkouts was about free choice.

“You try to tempt people - that is your job,” he proclaimed, pouncing on Jarvis’s admission that just one in three of Asda’s checkouts were “guilt-free” - jargon Jarvis picked up during her time as director general of communications at the Department of Health.

Whether her subsequent departure from Asda three months later was a direct result of the now infamous interview is disputed, but there is no doubt Naughtie’s attack kicked up a storm elsewhere.

So forceful were calls from campaigners and the public to ditch confectionery at supermarket checkouts in the wake of the programme that the government felt obliged to act. Four weeks later, the DH touted plans for “guilt-free” checkouts. It wasn’t to be. Proposals for an industry code of practice in July 2013 fell apart that same month when then health minister Anna Soubry ruled out any government clampdown.

Then, in October 2013, her replacement, Jane Ellison, warned retailers’ guilt lanes were back on the agenda, with retailers urged to sign up to a new voluntary agreement under the Responsibility Deal to regulate checkouts in January 2014.

But those plans collapsed when retailers walked away from the negotiating table. Retailers would have “to take a lead with individual initiatives” for the time being, the DH concluded, a position reiterated by Ellison in February this year.

So how have supermarkets evolved their checkout offers? Who’s taken a lead? Who’s holding back? What impact have new initiatives had on sales and profits? And is a change in the law either likely or necessary?

Pressure

Though grocers are currently free of either a voluntary or a regulatory framework, it’s not for want of trying on the part of campaigners.

This month the British Dietetic Association renewed calls for supermarkets to remove all “junk food” from stores as part of Dietitians Week, a campaign it has spearheaded alongside the Children’s Food Campaign. Pass or fail cards were issued for the public to deliver verdicts in stores. It spread the word on Twitter via the hashtag #junkfreecheckouts.

Action on Sugar has also joined the fight. “Parents have tried to make healthy decisions for themselves and their children, they’ve managed to make it to the checkout without picking up big bags of sweets and crisps, and it catches them at the last minute,” says campaign director Katherine Jenner. “It undermines their good intentions.”

This ongoing pressure, and the issue regularly being splashed across front pages, has left grocers with little choice but to take steps to amend their own practices. But they vary considerably (see boxes p28/9).

The most significant moves have come from Lidl, Tesco and Aldi, in that order. All three committed to removing confectionery from checkouts across their entire store estate in 2014, a move that was praised by campaigners.

Tesco says it took the decision, which came into force on 1 January 2015, after two-thirds of its customers said removing confectionery from checkouts would help them make healthier choices.

“We knew removing sweets from our checkouts was something they wanted us to do,” says a spokesman. “Customer feedback so far has been very positive, especially from parents.”

Healthy snacks?

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, of course. Tesco was left red-faced in March after a customer caught it selling Monster Munch, Mini Cheddars, Doritos and pork scratchings on its new ‘healthy’ checkout shelves.

“With the scale of change across our large store estate there have been a small number of instances where we’ve not got it right,” the spokesman admits. “But we’ve followed up as soon as possible to rectify it.”

Sainsbury’s and The Co-operative Group have exempted small c-stores from their sweet-free policy. The latter has instead launched a Healthier Snacking range, which hit checkouts in March.

The 26-strong range includes some fairly wacky innovation, including Strawberry Brûlée Flavour Fruit and Nut Mix, Spiced Ginger Popcorn and Triple Berry Rice Cakes. So how have they been developed? The Co-op has adopted a flexible view of nutritional profiling based on customer feedback. “The products have been chosen by taking the definition of healthier across a variety of customer needs,” explains healthy snacks buyer Kim Salmon.

So bestsellers like the Strawberry Brûlée Flavour Fruit and Nut Mix get a red traffic light for fat, saturates and sugar, but get a green light for salt, according to front-of-pack traffic-light labelling. By comparison, Monster Munch gets a red light for fat and salt but an amber for saturates and a green light for sugar. So according to front-of-pack traffic-light labelling the former qualify for checkouts at The Co-op due to the “natural health benefits” of their core ingredients of fruit and nuts, Salmon adds.

Morrisons has made a partial switch with one in five of its checkouts ‘junk’-free, while Asda is sticking for the time being with one in three, according to the BRC. An Asda spokeswoman says: “We believe in customer choice, which is why we offer a range of different products at checkouts - batteries and magazines as well as toiletries and some treats.”

Jenner rejects Asda’s position. “They are shaping choices by having these as the only products available,” she argues. “They are making a choice for us.”

Fat profits

Jenner believes retailers are reluctant to ditch ‘junk’ food products because they are “high-profit, high-margin products. It’s a quick extra expenditure. There is a reason why it’s there.”

She has a point. Checkouts account for 1% of store space, on average, but can generate up to 7% of sales, according to the EHI Retail Institute, offering sales productivity of £30,398 per sq m, seven times above the average for the entire store. And confectionery delivers average profit margins of 31.5%, miles ahead of the product average of 12.4%, the EHI found.

In convenience stores the impact is even greater, with till confectionery accounting for 15-20% of sales according to one c-store operator.

On the other hand, Salmon says that since its launch, The Co-op’s healthier snacking range has “exceeded expectations” in sales, and the plan is to add further products in the next year.

Lidl also claims little cause for concern on the sales/profit front. It says the guilt-free checkouts introduced in a 10-week trial recorded 20% higher footfall than traditional ones, with 70% of customers backing the rollout.

Fintan Hastings, external affairs adviser at the BRC, is also quick to deny any financial consideration from those retailers failing to follow suit. “I don’t think it’s a financial issue at all,” he says. “It’s down to consumer demand and what people want.”

Campaigners disagree. Malcolm Clark, co-ordinator of the Junk Free Checkouts campaign, points out that in conversations with Marks & Spencer, which packs checkout areas with all-butter shortbread, Percy Pigs and Walnut Whips, the retailer said its removal of confectionery “with child appeal” from “belted till points” (manned tills as opposed to self-service) in 2012 was “a big financial step”.

M&S declined the opportunity for an interview, but a spokesman says it is “always looking for ways to help our customers make healthy choices”.

As for Tesco, it appears to have taken the decision without calculating the cost. Asked whether making the switch had led to sacrificed sales, a spokesman said it was “currently reviewing the impact of the change and would look to share information in the future”.

And while Tesco’s gesture can be seen as an attempt to improve its image, Clark believes any hopes of a unilateral voluntary agreement among retailers will be stymied by commercial concerns.

“The failure of the voluntary pledge under the Responsibility Deal in 2014 was about protecting their profits and not wanting to do something that would be competitively disadvantageous,” he says.

Certainly former Tesco CEO Philip Clarke mentioned commercial concerns as an obstacle to voluntary measures in an August 2013 letter to health secretary Jeremy Hunt, which was later released under the Freedom of Information Act.

He wrote that legislation may in fact be required to “level the playing field” after the supermarket reportedly claimed it had been put at a competitive disadvantage by signing up to a number of pledges to which its rivals were not signatories.

Sugar intake

Still, the debate continues. And although the issue resurfaced in December 2014, at the Responsibility Deal steering group, there’s no sign of concrete progress, which campaigners say strengthens their calls for a ban on guilt lanes via a change in the law.

“Something much more powerful needs to be done to bring the stores in line,” says Melanie Wakeman, a senior lecturer in applied physiology at Birmingham University who has lobbied supermarkets on the issue. “They are saying their profit is more important to them than our health. Over the past 12 months we’ve seen draft guidelines and recommendations that cut our sugar intake. It makes perfect sense to me that if we’re being told to lower our intake of salt, fat and sugar we have to be enabled to do that.”

What form that regulation may take is not clear, and will inevitably be debated at length, but Clark believes a merger of codes under the Committee of Advertising Practice (non-broadcast) and the ASA (broadcast) extended to cover in-store promotions, coupled with best practice gleaned from nutritional profiling, could hold the answer.

Neither industry nor campaigners have long to wait to find out. A DH spokeswoman has confirmed its “next steps will be announced shortly”. What form they take remains to be seen, though she says she will keep The Grocer informed. But until that time, guilt lanes remain firmly in the dock.