Nearly half of sandwiches sold in the UK are high in salt, with some containing more than an adult’s recommended daily limit in a single serving. For a category positioned as a convenient everyday choice, that should raise serious questions about how health risks are embedded in plain sight.
Many of us grab a sandwich as a quick, everyday meal, and they are increasingly consumed outside the home. Yet nutrition information in the out-of-home sector, particularly on salt, remains inconsistent, difficult to access, or missing altogether. In that context, the food industry’s continued emphasis on “informed choice” is starting to wear thin.
Too much salt, too little visibility
Our sandwich report highlights a recurring issue across retail and foodservice – salt levels remain too high, poorly signposted and often unavoidable. In the retail sector alone, some products contained more salt than 12 standard bags of ready salted crisps.
Sandwiches sold in high street chains, coffee shops and bakeries were typically the highest in salt. At the same time, there was wide variation between similar products, demonstrating that extreme levels are not inevitable, and that lower‑salt versions are already achievable. The problem is visibility.
In the out‑of‑home sector, transparent nutrition labelling beyond calories remains limited or absent. Salt information is rarely displayed at the point of purchase and is often not easily accessible online. Front-of-pack labelling in the retail sector remains voluntary.
Consumers are regularly told to “make informed choices”. But how can they manage their salt intake without access to basic information? Around 75% of the salt in our diets is already added by businesses before food reaches the plate. Once it’s there, it cannot be removed. So, is it personal responsibility, or shared?
Reformulation works, and food businesses know it
The good news is that the industry already knows how to solve this. The UK once led the world in salt reduction. A co-ordinated programme, underpinned by reformulation and monitoring, lowered population salt intake, reduced average blood pressure and prevented thousands of premature deaths from heart disease and stroke, without damaging sales or consumer acceptance.
Our research shows we haven’t reached the limits of what’s possible. Some retailers and brands are already producing significantly lower‑salt sandwiches than their competitors, proving reformulation can be done without compromising product quality.
Yet progress has stalled since 2014. Under a voluntary system with weak monitoring and few incentives, salt reformulation is often deprioritised. This leaves responsible businesses at a disadvantage, while salt levels in the food supply remain too high.
A fragmented food environment
Stalled progress is made harder still by a regulatory framework that isn’t built to address it. There is a wider policy issue that businesses increasingly face: fragmentation in what counts as “unhealthy food”. Current regulations to improve access to healthier food focus largely on calories and sugar. This approach leaves a significant blind spot for salt, with many key contributors in population diets out of scope of the regulations.
As a result, products that are objectively less healthy from a cardiovascular perspective can still be widely promoted and advertised, creating an uneven and confusing food environment. High blood pressure affects people regardless of their weight, yet salt is treated as a secondary concern.
If the goal is genuinely to improve health, access to healthier food must apply across all food. High blood pressure does not depend on body weight, and a system that ignores salt sends a message that it matters less, when evidence shows the opposite.
From individual to business choice
Retailers and foodservice operators don’t need to wait for government action. They can accelerate reformulation and adopt consistent and visible salt labelling across retail and out‑of‑home settings.
Salt reduction remains one of the most effective public health measures available. It can improve health at scale without relying on every individual shopper to change their behaviour. For an industry that prides itself on knowing its customers, the message should be clear: people cannot choose what they cannot see, and they cannot avoid salt that has already been built into the food.
That is why, this Salt Awareness Week, we are calling on ministers to put salt reduction firmly back on the prevention agenda. The government must urgently review the outdated salt targets, introduce tougher mandatory limits through the proposed healthy food standard, and back them with meaningful financial penalties for companies that fail to act.
Sonia Pombo is head of research and impact at Action on Salt & Sugar
No comments yet