Food Active and the Children’s Food Campaign launch survey to gather parents views of packaging of food and drink aimed at children

25 Nov 2019 Food Active and the Children’s Food Campaign launch survey to gather parents views of packaging of food and drink aimed at children

Today Food Active and the Children’s Food Campaign have launched a new survey to gather parents’ perceptions of the food and drink packaging aimed at children. 

Cartoon, TV and film characters on food and drink packaging – they are everywhere! From long-standing iconic characters such as the Coco Pops Monkey to the latest children’s blockbuster Frozen 2, such characters are often used by food and drink companies to make their products more appealing to children.

The outgoing Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies highlighted this tactic in her recent special report ‘Time to Solve Childhood Obesity’, raising concerns of the impact this may be having on children’s eating behaviours [i] – and with good reason. Research from Action on Sugar, Action on Salt and the Children’s Food Campaign published earlier this year found that many of these characters are used on products that were high in fat, sugar and/or salt [ii].

Over the next four weeks, Food Active and the Children’s Food Campaign want to find out what parents, carers and guardians think about this type of marketing, whether it creates an issues for them you as a parent and whether you think there should be any restrictions in place to control this type of marketing.

The survey is open to any parent, carer or guardian with children aged between 18 months and 17 years living at home in the UK and the survey will close on Monday 23^rd December – so don’t delay, share your views below and make sure you share the survey with any other parents, carers or guardians eligible to take part.

If you have any questions about the survey, please email info@foodactive.org.uk

We would like to thank Mumsnet for helping to promote the research on their Guest Campaigns site, which highlights all of their own campaigning activity, as well as other causes that may be of interest to their network of mums. Take a look at the guest campaigns site here: https://www.mumsnet.com/campaigns

[i] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/837907/cmo-special-report-childhood-obesity-october-2019.pdf

[ii] http://www.actiononsugar.org/media/action-on-salt/Children’s-Packaging-Report.pdf

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