Stores ‘derail parental quest to feed children healthily’

The Children’s Food Campaign (CFC) said the three supermarkets displayed unhealthy food or drink at more than 80 per cent of their checkouts.

It also criticised the Co-operative, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose for making families queue past displays of unhealthy snacks to reach the tills.

Not one “traditional format” supermarket in the survey had any healthy food options promoted at its checkouts, the report said.

The Checkouts Checked Out report found that most supermarket branches and high street stores routinely promote unhealthy snacks at their tills and in their queuing areas, despite several promising to reduce the practice.

The survey of stores across London found that, in many cases, junk food such as sweets and crisps was positioned at children’s eye level.

The trend had also spread to smaller stores and non-food retailers including HMV, New Look, Superdrug and WHSmith, which all displayed sweets and chocolates in the queuing area near the checkouts, the CFC said.

A questionnaire to each of the retailers found that just one, Sainsbury’s, confirmed a policy of not selling “impulse confectionery” at their main checkouts, but added that they did display “gifting confectionery or seasonal lines”.

The campaign did commend the Waitrose store in Oxford Circus for its prominent display of fresh fruit in the queuing area before the tills, and called for this to be the norm across all stores.

CFC spokeswoman and co-author of the report Sophie Durham said: “It’s time to get the junk off the checkouts once and for all.”