Innovative approaches in food environment policy around the world

This is not an exhaustive list of innovative policies, nor is it intended to be fully geographically representative of all world regions. If you know of other interesting, innovative policies around the world, please get in touch — we would be interested to hear about them.

How we carried out the research

To assess the innovativeness of policies relative to the UK context, we spoke to expert stakeholders and carried out extensive desk research. ‘Shallower’ innovations were policies that had only small or incremental design changes compared to well-known or extensively implemented policies. ‘Deeper’ innovations tended to be more radical in concept with a greater potential for impact and system transformation, whether positive or negative. The innovation could be the policy idea, the method of implementing the policy, or the inclusion of the policy within a wider package of measures.

We are aware of long-running debates about defining innovation in policy, and many qualitative judgements were necessary while curating this shortlist of case studies. You can find more information about the methods and decisions we took below.

Nesta does not endorse the introduction of these specific policies in the UK context, even if some principles or elements of their design might be instructive for the development of policy to tackle obesity in the UK. 

Are there countries that are innovating to improve public policy relating to the food environment?

Around the world, we found hotspots of more radical thinking. Regions like the Nordics are forward-thinking in piloting fresh new concepts, exemplified by the collaboration between Swedish innovation and food agencies to redesign the school meal system, and the inter-Nordic collaboration to modernise food marketing monitoring. Other regions are at the frontier in implementing familiar policy ideas in cutting-edge ways, such as Latin American approaches to food labelling and advertising practices, or fiscal measures.

However, our research suggested that governments of all stripes have focused on implementing a narrow selection of policy concepts to tackle obesity through the food environment. Global food policy debates are focused on ‘the usual suspects’: well-evaluated policy approaches that, if implemented consistently and collectively, can help to address the obesity crisis. There are over 120 ‘sugar taxes’ worldwide, covering 52% of the world’s population. Mandatory labelling rules, and limitations on the marketing and promotion of unhealthy items, are other examples of established policies with evidence to suggest they are effective in creating choice architecture that enables consumers to make healthier food decisions.

But what about policies that have less evaluation? There are lots of innovative new ideas being proposed and discussed, but promising new policy concepts rarely get rolled out and tested at a meaningful scale. In many countries this is because there’s a lack of political commitment to tackling the underlying factors driving ill health. This makes it difficult to implement even those policies that already have an evidence base – let alone innovative or untested policy approaches. It’s possible to see why the food policy debate is not as innovative as it could be: a lot of the energy of food policy thinkers and campaigners is spent on trying to get well-evidenced policies implemented. 

However, the scale of the obesity challenge and complexity of solving it means that policy thinkers and decision-makers globally should do more to embrace innovation alongside tried-and-tested methods. We see two main ways to go about this:

1. Taking more innovative policy approaches
2. Innovating to influence politics

Taking more innovative policy approaches

This could involve thinking outside the food policy toolbox to use wider levers that have indirect but potentially significant impacts on the food environment. We saw examples of this in New York City with the FRESH scheme, which uses planning regulations alongside tax breaks to create incentives that make healthier food more accessible. Copenhagen offers another example, where procurement systems have been overhauled to achieve a shift towards organic consumption. Finally, in Portugal, all ministers are mandated to consider the effect of their policies on health and nutrition.

Relatedly, there could be changes to the systems of accountability for obesity, such as in the case of Japan’s ‘Metabo law’, where the government holds companies and local authorities responsible for health checks on their employees, creating financial incentives to promote healthy working environments. Diversifying the range of public bodies accountable for creating a healthy food environment by changing incentives could help overcome the issues that health ministries face in not owning the full range of levers to effectively improve food environments.

Finally, embracing innovative policies could involve taking a longer-term approach. Being more anticipatory of lifestyle and food trends that could impact health and regulating as appropriate at an early stage is one way of doing this (that Nesta has previously advocated for). For example, growth in the food delivery market has allowed innovations in the out-of-home food sector such as the development of 'dark kitchens' (delivery-only kitchens with an exclusive online presence) which are harder to regulate in comparison to a high-street food outlet. Rapid innovation in fields such as digital marketing and data capture can make existing policies less effective or even redundant, as Nordic countries are seeking to understand by collaborating to preempt and standardise monitoring tactics. Alternatively, accepting shorter-term trade-offs to achieve long-term goals may be essential to achieve really significant policy success, as Nordic countries are exploring with the Nordic Health 2030 initiative – but this does require sustained political leadership on health over a long period of time, which isn’t easy to achieve.

While embracing innovation to tackle obesity necessitates trialling new policy ideas with little formal evidence, we also need to develop evaluations of their effectiveness during implementation. Evaluations should measure both outputs and outcomes to ensure that we can track progress, make systems accountable and change course where necessary. But most importantly, we should see if policies actually work. Most of the policies we looked at do not have robust evaluation; it’s crucial that any innovative policies adopted in the UK will be supported with clear evaluation plans.

Innovating to influence politics

Food policy thinkers could develop narratives that link healthy food environments to other social issues with political salience, working with the grain of the UK’s existing food culture. We’ve seen how effective bottom-up food cultures can be in the example of organic conversion within the public kitchens of Copenhagen, driven in part by widespread concern about the environmental effects of non-organic farming on Danish land. There are also interesting examples of Asian countries encouraging healthy diets by leaning into patriotic pride in national cuisines, such as in Korea.

The government could rethink the ways in which actors influence food or health policy in the UK, including how transparency regulations help government to manage the interests of industry and citizens fairly. Brazil is an interesting example where the government uses strong policy language to manage ‘abusive’ child food marketing, although the UK would need strong enforcement mechanisms to match (in Brazil, enforcement relies on corporate self-regulation).

Shining a light on ambitious food policies across the world could help to recontextualise the ambition of current UK health policy. For example, if policymakers and the general public are aware that Japan – which has a significantly lower obesity rate than the UK – has taken a directive approach like the Metabo law to improve health, then interventions that are less intrusive but well-evidenced might be more palatable.

Annex

Our research process

We wanted to find and learn from the most innovative policies to tackle obesity from around the world to help us meet our goal to halve obesity in the UK by 2030. We were particularly looking for policies for which there is less evidence to understand cutting-edge approaches that could be significant for tackling obesity in the future.

We were interested in whether and how innovative policies could be translated into the UK system to help tackle obesity, and what challenges this might pose. We also considered what makes a policy innovative (whether this is novelty on the international landscape or in a UK context) and what the original context of a policy means for its success.

To answer these questions we:

1. Developed a framework and method for identifying innovative approaches worldwide.
2. Conducted an initial horizon scan to develop a longlist of over 80 case studies, examining a range of sources including large-scale policy databases, articles, blogs, podcasts and speaking to a number of food policy experts from around the world. We also tested out using generative AI in the research process, and kept records of innovative ideas that had been proposed but never implemented. While promoting health or tackling obesity was the primary focus of most longlisted policies, we included a few policies where health or obesity was a secondary or one amongst several goals.
3. Selected 10 policies representing strikingly different policy approaches, focusing on areas relevant to our healthy life mission. We analysed these in detail to create case studies that, to varying extents, the UK could learn from.
4. Explored a number of speculative UK policy futures inspired by aspects of the case studies. We steered clear of ideas for tackling obesity that  did not focus on the food environment. 

We had to make a number of qualitative judgements throughout the process. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss the research process or any of the findings from the project further.