After years of u-turns, dilly-dallying, lobbying, and other hokey cokey-ing, the government’s junk food ad ban – officially the “advertising restrictions on less healthy food and drink” – finally came into force earlier this year. And today, the new regulations claimed their first victims.

Lidl Northern Ireland has been rapped by the Advertising Standards Authority over a paid-for online influencer ad featuring its pain suisse, and Iceland over ads that appeared on the Daily Mail’s website showing a number of sugary treats.

The ever-measured Institute of Economic Affairs raged that the ASA’s actions “read like something out of a dystopian satire”.

“One can only laugh at such earnest attempts to enforce this ludicrous policy,” spittled Dr Christopher Snowdon, the IEA’s head of lifestyle economics.

To be fair, on the face of it, the application of the regs might seem a little ridiculous.

Fast food, not junk food

In Lidl’s ad, the cheese pretzel that also featured was fine to include as it wasn’t HFSS. And the almond croissant shown, although HFSS, was not identifiable.

Notably, there were businesses scrutinised in the first raft of ASA actions on HFSS that – in Snowdon’s words – “got away with it”. Namely fast food chain German Doner Kebab for an Instagram post by influencer John ‘Bosh!’ Fisher, also known as Big John. The scoffed foods featuring – among them a chicken kebab and chicken doner burrito – were deemed to not be HFSS under the nutrient profiling model.

And travel agent On The Beach was investigated for its TV ad showing a boy taking a chocolate doughnut from an airport lounge buffet. It was okayed by the ASA because viewers would understand the ad was about the lounge rather than the doughnut.

But the ASA can only enforce the legislation it has before it. Is the promotion of kebabs less harmful to public health than promoting a pain suisse? An interesting question – but not one for the authority. Its job is, only and rightly so, to judge whether specific ads have breached the letter of the law.

Writing in The Grocer today, Guy Parker, CEO of the ASA, explained its enforcement work of course “demands nuance”. But “in judging whether our new rules have been broken, the devil is in the detail of the law”.

Push the rules to their limits

Of course, it hasn’t truly been tested yet. A key mechanism of the new law is the so-called “identifiability test”. This is what the ASA will deploy in deciding whether ads feature “less healthy foods” (LHFs).

In the Lidl ad ruling today, the almond croissant was not identifiable because it couldn’t be seen clearly. There’s also the complication of ‘brand ads’ – where promoting a masterbrand but not a specific product is OK. But would, say, a chocolate bar in Cadbury dairy Milk’s purple livery be deemed an identifiable product even without the logo? A red and brown pixelated blur in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle? Ad creatives, by their nature, like to push the rules to their limits – exactly where the breaking point is, is not yet known.

Crucially, today’s ruling proves the ASA is watching, and will act. In the ASA annual report, published this morning, it revealed 22,383 ads were amended or removed as a result of its work in 2025. It resolved some 40,000 advertising complaints and some 60 million online ads were scanned by its AI-powered Active Ad Monitoring system.

Brands promoting HFSS products are unlikely to get away with pushing that bar too far. But precisely what they can get away with is yet to be seen.

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