Investors could help turn back tide of processed foods - Jeremy Grant

Picking up the latest free magazine from Tesco last week, I noticed a promotional paradox.

Tesco’s magazine features ‘healthy’ recipes – but processed foods like Pringles feature prominently in the advertising (Picture: 8th - stock.adobe.com)

Its pages were packed with appetising-looking recipes for healthy dishes such as “Spiced cauliflower steak burgers” and “Charred summer greens”.

Yet most of the magazine’s advertisements carried a different nutritional proposition: processed foods such as Pringles snacks, Dairylea cheese triangles, KitKat cereal (yes, really) and a recipe kit for French’s “Buttermilk Chicken with Gravy Mix & Fries Seasoning”. All, of course, available at Tesco, as the adverts make clear.

We live in a world of consumer choice. Yet we also live in a world that is more complicated than that, as I was reminded at an event hosted last week at the Edinburgh offices of Greenbank, the sustainable and ethical investing arm of Rathbones, a UK investment manager.

Jeremy Grant is a freelance writer and editor, and was a journalist at the Financial Times and Reuters for 25 years (Picture: Charlie Bibby)

What people eat isn’t defined solely by personal preference. It’s driven by the “food environment”, made up of the availability of healthy foods, affordability and advertising by food companies. In the current environment, defined for so many by the cost-of-living crisis, what drives food choice is, increasingly, affordability — as the David Hume Institute showed in its latest quarterly “Understanding Scotland” survey, unveiled at the event.

Produced with Diffley Partnership and Charlotte Street Partners, the survey polls over 2,000 people across Scotland on a range of socio-economic issues. It showed that over half (52 per cent) of people are shopping for food based on price rather than health, and over a quarter (28 per cent) are reducing the quantity or quality of fruits and vegetables in their diet. A similar proportion (27 per cent) are consuming more packaged or processed foods.

Food companies obviously have a role to play here. But we can’t rely on voluntary initiatives. That’s why investors are also important, allocating capital to where change is most likely. Having accurate data on what companies are doing – or not doing – is therefore vital when it comes to investment decisions.

Greenbank has been engaging with government on nutrition since 2021 when it set up the Investor Coalition on Food Policy, created to provide policy feedback on the National Food Strategy, produced that year by Leon restaurant chain co-founder Henry Dimbleby.

The coalition, which represents over 30 investors with over £6 trillion in assets, is calling for the introduction of mandatory reporting by food companies of what and how much they sell, including sales of protein by type, sales of fruit and vegetables and sales of major nutrients (fibre, saturated fat, sugar and salt).

“A lack of consistent data makes it hard for investors to evaluate a company’s impact on the environment and health and to measure the risk associated with these exposures,” says Sophie Lawrence, Greenbank’s Stewardship and Engagement Lead, adding that voluntary reporting has “consistently failed to deliver on promises of improved health outcomes”.

This is positive. But it is not likely alone to deal with the deficiencies in our food environment. For one thing, in the absence of choices, people end up being captured by what food companies tell them via advertising, which is used to defend and grow market share.

As Pete Ritchie, Director of Nourish Scotland, told the Greenbank event: “We should stop treating nutrition as a private responsibility of citizens and make ensuring good public nutrition a key responsibility of governments.”

Jeremy Grant is a freelance writer and editor, and was a journalist at the Financial Times and Reuters for 25 years