Govt must support healthy food plan

IN a largely unregulated freemarket, food retailers in Australia have a lot of discretion to promote products within their store in ways to get the best dollar return. This leads to the prominent placing and price promotion of unhealthy items such as chocolate bars and sugary drinks, which have high profit margins, are highly desirable, and contribute to the burden of preventable chronic disease and related conditions in Australia.

The UK government has discovered a solution to addressing this. In October 2022, it introduced legislation to restrict retailer promotion and placement of unhealthy food and drinks in food retail stores and supermarkets, through The Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021.

This means that from October 2022, healthy foods only can be placed at checkout, front-of-store and end-ofaisles, and from October 2023, volume promotions will be on healthy food and drinks only.

While choice is there to consider unhealthy food and drinks, customers don’t have to exercise as much willpower or tend to children’s pester power when they shop.

Can we do the same in Australia? Customers would welcome such legislation but there has been little action by governments in Australia to protect customers from retail promotion of unhealthy food and drinks. There has, however, been action and leadership shown in remote Australia to tackle the everincreasing burden of preventable chronic disease.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders in some remote Australian communities have voluntarily implemented retail restrictions on the promotion and placement of unhealthy food and drinks in their community stores.

In 2018, The Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA), Australia’s largest Indigenous corporation, partnered with Monash University on the Healthy Stores 2020 study, to generate the world’s first evidence on retail restrictions on promotion and placement of unhealthy food and drinks. This study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, showed that restrictions on retail promotion and placement of unhealthy food and drinks reduced sales of high sugar food and drinks and did not decrease the bottom line.

Following this success, the ALPA Aboriginal board shaped the Healthy Stores 2020 strategy into policy and invited the store directors of the stores it managed to adopt it. All store boards agreed and the ALPA board then instigated additional sugar reduction strategies. The ALPA tracks its sugar sales and now reports 84.6 tonnes less sugar sold across 26 sites since 2018, when Healthy Stores 2020 ended.

This has come at no or little cost to the customer as choice has not been affected, and price promotions are applied to healthy type food products and not unhealthy ones.

The ALPA has trailblazed this bold policy initiative in Australia.

The Northern Territory government has the opportunity to do the same and lead the way for other jurisdictions in Australia for the benefit of the whole nation.

In 2022, the NT government took over the Commonwealth government-initiated remote store licensing scheme. Unbeknown to most Australians, that scheme had required food retail business owners to provide a satisfactory range of healthy and good quality food, drink or grocery items. While the NT government reworks the scheme into what will be called the ‘NT food security program’, this presents a policy opportunity for the government to regulate for restrictions on remote store retailer promotion and placement of unhealthy food and drinks.

To support this initiative, Monash University co-leads a coalition for Healthy Remote Stores in the NT with the ALPA, University of Queensland, Menzies School of Health Research, Central Australia Aboriginal Congress, Laynhapuy Homelands Aboriginal Corporation, Healthy Living NT, Diabetes Australia, Heart Foundation, Indigenous Allied Health Australia, and the Obesity Policy Coalition.

It provides evidence and practical know-how for the NT government to include retail restrictions on the promotion and placement of unhealthy food and drinks in the remote stores licensing program.

Let’s get behind Indigenous leaders in remote communities to create health-enabling food retail environments for improved health and wellbeing, and do what we can to ensure that Healthy Stores 2020 evidence is taken up in the regions where it originated – and possibly beyond.