Innovation Sweet Spots: Food innovation, obesity and food environments

This chapter complements the insights derived from venture capital, patent and research funding trends with analysis of the public discourse around food innovations and technologies. We consider this an additional signal, useful in that it tells us something important about the public profile of a given category of innovation. As a proxy for the news discourse, we used the open access platform of the Guardian news website. While this news source can be seen as somewhat politically left-leaning, it has the advantage of covering a wide-range of technologies and innovations. The Guardian is also, to the best of our knowledge, the only major UK newspaper to make its text freely available for research. For signals on policy discourse, we used public records of parliamentary debates (Hansard), which can provide indications of which innovations are more prominent in the political agenda in the UK.

Overview of trends in public discourse around food innovation

Overall, we identified a much more active discourse around food technologies and innovations in news coverage when compared to debates in House of Commons. With the exception of ‘health’ or ‘food waste’ categories, the other categories of food innovation were seldom mentioned in parliamentary speeches: only for ‘health’ and ‘food waste’ did we identify more than five speeches per year between 2017 and 2021. This could be partly due to our specification of ‘health’ and ‘food waste’ topics being somewhat broader compared to other innovation categories such as ‘personalised nutrition’, ‘alternative protein’, or ‘cooking and kitchen’ technologies. Nonetheless, this finding indicates that emerging food technologies are not yet a major subject of legislative debate.

We also note that since early 2020 the public discourse around health was likely dominated by coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns. This could also have limited the coverage of other topics linked to food, nutrition and obesity. 

In the following chapter, we focus mostly on the news discourse where we find varying levels of prominence and growth for the innovation categories of interest (see Figure 39 below). Note that here we have compared trends between the main innovation categories, whereas in the summary chapter we provided a summarised comparison between select key categories and subcategories together.

Large increase in mentions of food delivery in the news

We found that news discourse related to ‘logistics and delivery’ could be seen as ‘hot’ according to our trends typology (ie, large magnitude and high growth of news mentions). This category has seen the largest increase, with more than 350% growth between 2017 and 2021, and almost 100 articles per year on average.

This growth is primarily fuelled by a rapid increase in the ‘delivery’ subcategory (see Figure 40 below). News articles mentioning food deliveries have been increasing since around 2013-2014, coinciding with the establishment of Deliveroo and Uber Eats, and further skyrocketed around the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. As the lockdown restrictions during the pandemic posed a significant threat to restaurants, food delivery services became an important source of revenue, with their market value increasing by approximately 50% during 2020.

These articles cover a range of aspects of food deliveries, from mentions of companies operating in this space and more problematic reflections on user experience, to concerns about the ‘gig economy’ and working conditions of the delivery riders. These articles also consider the wider consequences of this innovation area, such as the potential shrinking of kitchen space in flats and impacts on restaurants. Such articles appear to reflect the growing presence of food delivery services in many people’s lives, as well as more troubling wider implications. 

In contrast, in parliamentary debates we found only occasional references to food deliveries, primarily concerning delivery drivers’ employment conditions.

News mentions of ‘alternative proteins’ overtaking ‘reformulation’

Trends in the ‘innovative food’ category suggest that news mentions of alternative proteins have overtaken food reformulation (see Figure 41 below). The proportion of news articles on alternative proteins has experienced a rapid growth of about 320% between 2017 and 2021, whereas reformulation articles have decreased by about a half (45%) in the same time period.

Interestingly, we find that articles mentioning cultured meat constitute the majority (62%) of alternative protein articles, largely outnumbering mentions of plant-based protein (25%) or fermentation innovations (3%). This is likely a sign of early hype (as well as the identification of potential concerns), given that lab-grown meat was reported to have gone on sale for the first time as recently as 2020. Indeed, other analysts have also placed this technology at the peak of its hype cycle in 2021.

One caveat of this analysis is that we did not explicitly search for specific brand names. It could be the case that plant-based and fermentation innovations (for example, the mycoprotein product Quorn or plant-based Impossible Burger) are established enough to be often referred simply by brand name.

Meanwhile, articles related to reformulated foods (including mentions of low fat, low sugar or high fibre) reached their peak around 2018, coinciding with the introduction of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy in the UK. During this time the number of mentions of ‘sugar’ within articles analysed peaked at 251 times in 2016, which has since then decreased to below 20 mentions in 2021. More recently, we find an increase in the mentions of ‘fibre’, from less than 15 instances before 2016 to 51 mentions in 2019. This echoes the observations of recent increase in patent applications for fibre-additives discussed in Chapter 3.

In parliament, reformulation also appears to have been discussed mostly in the context of the soft drinks levy, whereas alternative proteins were practically never mentioned. That does not mean, however, that policymakers in the UK are not considering this emerging area of innovation. For example, the Food Standards Agency has recently commissioned work to evaluate policy responses regarding alternative proteins for human consumption.

Sustained growth for references to food waste in the news discourse

Food waste is another area of sustained growth in the news discourse, with approximately 64% growth in terms of the proportion of articles between 2017 and 2021 (see Figure 42 below). While this growth might be specific to the Guardian as our source of news data, interestingly, Google search trends are also indicative of a similar pattern in terms of increased interest in this topic on the part of search engine users.

The news articles in this category cover a wide range of topics: from practical advice on cutting household food waste to technologies that can help such as smart fridges and food-sharing apps, as well as pointing out broader issues about ‘best before’ labels being confusing, and the contribution of food waste to greenhouse gas emissions.

In analysis of parliamentary debates (see Figure 43 below) we also observed a sustained number of speeches mentioning food waste, which initially increased in around 2007, coinciding with the launch of the Love Food, Hate Waste campaign. More recently, there was another spike in mentions in 2019, which coincided with the Government urging organisations and individuals to make a pledge for cutting food waste. This reflects that this is a sustained area of interest for policymakers.

Health-related discourse

Health-related articles, primarily referencing obesity but also personalised nutrition and dietary supplements, constitute the largest proportion of news articles across our categories. The pattern of news discourse in the Guardian points to two large waves, with the first peak around 2004 and the second peak around 2018 (see Figure 44 below).

We see similar two waves in terms of references in parliamentary debates, punctuated by spikes coinciding with major policy initiatives like the Choosing Health and Choosing A Better Diet strategies around 2004, and strategies focusing on childhood obesity published in multiple parts since 2016 (Figure 45).

While recent news articles increasingly cover innovations such as personalised nutrition, the approval of a weight loss drug treatment by the NHS, or people’s experiences with such drugs, we note that these news articles and parliamentary speeches might also be discussing obesity more broadly. Nonetheless, these results indicate that there is a sustained level of both news and parliamentary discourse related to obesity, which also echoes the trend of sustained levels of public research funding for this area reported in Chapter 4.

We found that about 7% of the health-related news articles (mentioning terms like ‘obesity’ or ‘overweight’) also mention terms describing food technology and innovation areas. The largest contribution to this overlap comes from articles mentioning reformulation (for example, in the context of junk food and ultra-processed food). This indicates that there is a limited but existing overlap in the discourse on obesity and on food innovations and technologies that impact the wider food environment.

More detailed analysis of the specific language around obesity is out of scope for this report, but we note the substantial body of research exploring the different framings used in the public discourse around obesity, namely regarding personal responsibility or social drivers of obesity. 

A study published in 2012 by researchers at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow looked at a wide selection of newspapers. Their findings suggested that press coverage between 1996 and 2010 had started shifting away from framing obesity around individual responsibility. Instead, news coverage had increasingly viewed it as a social challenge best tackled by regulatory change at the population level. 

However, more recent work by researchers at the universities of Lancaster and Leeds suggested that in a subsequent time period between 2008 and 2017, obesity might have been represented increasingly as a biomedical problem that is both caused by, and could be prevented by, action at the level of the individual. Meanwhile, the researchers found that focus on wider environmental determinants of health, including the role of government and the food industry, has decreased in that time period. 

Another study published in 2022, by the same researchers at Lancaster University, points out a difference between different sources of news, with “left-leaning” newspapers focusing more on structural and institutional issues, and “right-leaning” newspapers writing more about personal responsibility or the role of biological factors in determining an individual’s risk. 

The arrival of effective weight loss drugs and increasingly personalised nutrition services to the market might well deepen the emphasis in the popular discourse on a ‘personal responsibility’ narrative. Looking ahead, there may be value in spotlighting the role of the food environment itself, and the innovations which are transforming it, to create greater awareness for the public and policymakers that individual responsibility or blame can only get so far. 

Conclusion

Through the use of Guardian coverage as a proxy, we find an increasing focus on food deliveries and alternative proteins in the news discourse, while the prominence of reformulated foods appears to have subsided since the introduction of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy in the UK. Food waste and obesity and health-related innovations are other areas of active coverage, whereas categories related to innovations in cooking and kitchen (eg, kitchen robots) as well as restaurants and retail are mentioned less frequently. For parliamentary discourse, our results suggest that most categories of food innovation are yet to become a focus of debate, reflecting their emerging nature.

Methodology

We used The Guardian Open Platform for news data, and Hansard archive for parliamentary debates. Guardian data can be accessed using the official The Guardian Open Data API. Hansard data was collected using Evan Odell’s code.

In contrast to the analysis of venture capital, research funding and patents, this analysis was performed in a more automated fashion, relying on keyword search and using article and speech selection criteria to minimise the number of irrelevant results. 

To reduce the amount of erroneous results, we required that each news article or parliamentary speech contains at least one “food term” to increase the likelihood that the results are related to food or obesity (eg, ‘food’, ‘groceries’, ‘vegetable’, ‘diet’, and similar terms). In the case of Guardian news data, we also required at least one “innovation term” to increase the likelihood that the results are related to new technologies or research (eg, ‘innovation’, ‘novel’, ‘technology’). Applying both the “food term” and “innovation term” filters removed around 38% of the initial news article search results from further analysis.

To determine whether specific keywords were returning particularly erroneous results, we also carried out a manual accuracy checking step, where we randomly sampled 10 articles for each search term, and determined the fraction of irrelevant news articles. This revealed search terms that were a combination of two or more words or phrases (eg, “food” and “reformulation”) often returned noisy results: these news articles tended to be long, and produced a chance that the words or phrases were mentioned in different contexts. We amended this by requiring that all words in the search query were mentioned in the same sentence, and that sole keywords or phrases returning erroneous results more than 50% of the time were excluded altogether from the final results. This additional filtering helped remove a substantial proportion of the news article search results – around half.

We also checked whether the further restriction that articles should contain at least two search queries, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, would impact the results. We found that this again reduced the amount of articles by about half, but did not cause substantial changes to the overall trends.

The number of news articles about a given topic in a given year could be influenced by the total number of articles published in that year. To remove the potential influence of year-to-year fluctuations in the publisher’s total output, we normalised our results by dividing the number of articles mentioning specific innovations by the total number of articles available on The Guardian Open Platform (we expressed this proportion as a percentage in the figures above). We performed similar normalisation of the Hansard results by using the total number of speeches published in Hansard in a given year. In this way, we can ascertain whether a particular topic has grown in relative prominence.

Because this is a more automated analysis compared to the previous chapters, more emphasis should be given to the overall growth trends as opposed to the magnitude of the trends. The number of articles and speeches was, as noted, influenced by the filtering steps.

Acknowledgments

We thank Joshua Twaites for his help in collecting The Guardian and Hansard data, and carrying out the keyword accuracy checks.