These are frightening and uncertain times for a food and drink industry that finds itself at the heart of a potentially lethal pincer movement.
Yesterday, in a 40-minute attack that stood in stark contrast to the ’stop-start’ delivery of years of government public health policy, Professor Susan Jebb explained why – in no uncertain terms.
Chosen to deliver the 25th City Food and Drink Lecture, speaking to an audience of over 600 food execs and fellow academics, the FSA chair and leading obesity boffin argued that a potent cocktail of weight-loss drugs and mass consumer shift away from ultra-processed foods would force the food sector into a radical reset. One which only the most agile would survive.
Even the VIP guest at the prestigious event, the Princess Royal – whose family faces an even more immediate crisis – appeared impressed. Certainly, no one within the Guildhall’s cavernous could have failed to be either impressed, or deeply unsettled.
Shrinking food market
Jebb, whose role at the FSA does not (at least not yet) formally extend this far – but whose role as a public health professor at the University of Oxford and a government food strategy adviser most certainly does – set out the case for the prosecution in stark terms.
Faced with a surge in public appetite for mind‑altering GLP‑1 drugs – which rapidly silence the ‘food noise’ in the brain – the market, she argued, is about to shrink. And not just figuratively: it may contract even more dramatically than the plates served at the once‑legendary post‑lecture City feast.
Jebb singled out high street giant Greggs, noting that its share price had halved, and warning this was unlikely to be an isolated case. Entire categories, particularly impulse, she suggested, should brace themselves for more of the same.
But as if this was not enough, the food industry also faces a public which, Jebb argued, has decided it no longer trusts ultra-processed foods and is embarking on a dietary change she argues will cause far more disruption than any of the “failed government interventions” (including the one she helped to lead in the now long-defunct Responsibility Deal).
Jebb, once something of a defender of the food industry’s record, was scathing of the delays and rowbacks in successive government policies to try to tackle a “catastrophic health emergency“ crisis that currently sees a fifth of all 11-year-olds obese.
But she reserved her harshest judgement for what she claimed was a “wake-up call” for those in the room, the industry bosses she declared had “failed on their watch”.
“Fine words and good intentions are just not good enough,” said Jebb.
“There needs to be a fundamental reset of the food on offer. I yet believe the companies that deliver this will protect the profits but it is possible, probable even, that not all food business will survive. Those that adapt will.”
Public health vs profit
The big question, of course, is whether Jebb is right and whether the food industry and government will act on her call. It’s one thing landing a message on an occasion like this, but quite another to cut through in the current economic and political maelstrom.
Will the global geopolitical strife and domestic chaos currently facing the government make it impossible for interventions, such as the food strategy, to be effective? Will it be impossible to drown out the noise from those focusing on the economic consequences of government regulation or huge further spending on reformulation?
It was here that Jebb’s argument was less convincing. Her examples of health success stories in the industry were, it has to be said, flaky at best. Was she really suggesting that Donald Trump and his health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr are showing the path forward by ripping up the public health rulebook while the UK dithers?
As Ian Wright, the former FDF chief executive picked to deliver the case for the defence in the panel session that followed, pointed out, Jebb’s address, however impressive, did to a certain extent ignore reality. It was, he said, nearly 30 minutes in before she even mentioned the word profit.
Jebb’s case, however, is that we have reached the “tipping point” that signals doom for any company no longer prepared to get on board the health train. For it to successfully reach its destination, she emphasised, that train has to be driven by the industry itself, rather than politicians.
It was a powerful message indeed. But how long will that message continue to reverberate, now that the audience has vacated the corridors of the Guildhall and gone back out into the real world?
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