Healthier food mark initiative gathers pace

The Department of Health (DoH) is making progress with the Healthier Food Mark, with stage two of the scheme poised for launch later this month.
The project is designed to promote the sourcing and consumption of healthier, sustainable food in the UK public sector and was announced​ last year. All caterers that meet guidelines on fruit and vegetable content and reduced saturated fat, sugar and salt will be able to display the mark.
The initiative was first proposed in the Cabinet Office’s Food Matters​ report, published last year. It is being driven by a steering group led by the DoH, partnered by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Select Food and Drink Federation (FDF) members, the Food Standards Agency, large foodservice businesses and other stakeholder groups are also involved in this group.
It is understood that the DoH, which is funding the project, has invested at least £800,000 in it so far. Stage one involved canvassing the opinions of public sector procurement services on whether such a scheme could work and, if so, how.
One of the proposals under discussion is that the scheme should be split into three tiers: bronze, silver and gold, with increasingly robust criteria for each.
An initial 90 criteria for the scheme have now been whittled down to 39 nutrition and sustainability measures. These will then be presented to the government’s Council of Food Policy Advisors, which will feed back their input to ministers.
In addition, 60 organisations will road-test the criteria to see if they are “workable, practical and don’t add cost”, said FDF director of member services Charlotte Lawson. “These pilots will assess the criteria in a variety of different public procurement settings such as prisons, schools and hospitals.”
She said the aim was to launch the pilots later this month, with an evaluation in the summer and a national rollout early next year. However, this timetable could be disrupted by the general election.
“The key is that this mark does not add cost to procurement and that it does deliver measurable improvement on nutritional levels and environmental impact,” added Lawson.