Tomatoes face the axe under Labour’s ‘nonsensical’ junk food crackdown
Rule change will confuse customers and make products unhealthier, warn supermarkets
Tomatoes face being stripped out of pasta sauces and ready meals under Labour’s “nonsensical” junk food crackdown.
Food chiefs have warned that government plans to label thousands of products containing sugar as unhealthy would encourage companies to replace natural ingredients with additives.
Products labelled as unhealthy under the new system – from pureed fruit to vegetables – could be included in a ban on advertising junk food before the broadcasting watershed.
If ministers decide to include them, it means products such as pasta sauces and fruit yogurts could be forbidden from being advertised before 9pm if they are above the sugar thresholds.
Under a planned crackdown on junk food, unveiled by Labour last week, health officials set out plans to update the classification system for what is deemed healthy and unhealthy. The new methodology will include “free sugars” that are released from fruit and vegetables when they are pureed or mashed.
The overhaul is part of a wider crackdown on obesity and forms part of the Labour’s 10-year health plan, which aims to reduce the £11bn-a-year cost of obesity to the NHS.
However, food bosses said including free sugars in the calculations would encourage manufacturers to strip out natural products, making it harder for the public to eat their five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and get a range of nutrients and fibre.
Stuart Machin, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, labelled the plans “nonsensical” and said the proposed change “encourages us to remove fruit purees from yogurts or tomato paste from pasta sauces and replace them with artificial sweeteners”.
A spokesman for Mars Food & Nutrition, which makes Dolmio pasta sauces, one of Britain’s best known brands, warned that the rules could have “unintended consequences for consumers, such as vegetable and fruit purees and pastes being replaced with ingredients of lower nutrient density”.
The company said it was “reviewing the recently published proposals”.
Health officials are considering whether to use the new classification system – officially referred to as the Nutrient Profiling Model (NPM) – for the junk food advertising ban, which currently only applies to products such as crisps, sweets and biscuits.
If taken forward, many products made with fruit and vegetable purees would be banned from being advertised before 9pm. The watershed limit would apply to sauces, ready meals and fruit juices.
Kate Halliwell, the chief scientific officer at the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), said companies would be likely to consider reducing the amount of fruit and vegetables from their recipes in order to escape the restrictions.
She said: “Given the majority of the UK population are already struggling to reach their recommended five-a-day and daily fibre intake, we’re concerned that an unintended consequence of this policy could be that it makes it even harder for consumers to achieve this.”
A spokesman for Asda said the plans would “confuse customers, undermine data accuracy, and slow our progress helping customers build healthier baskets, aligned to our 2030 healthy sales target”.
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