The Council of Better Business Bureaus’ Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI) has released updates to its self-regulatory program to address food marketing to children. The updates include progress toward lower sodium targets and clearer added sugars labeling. Although 18 prominent food, beverage and restaurant companies have pledged to adopt the updates, US lobby group the Center for the Science in Public Interest (CSPI) has criticized the updates for failing to heed expert advice.

The CFBAI aims to improve food advertising to children and address concerns regarding childhood obesity. CFBAI’s participants, who represent the majority of child-directed food advertising, use its Uniform Nutrition Criteria to determine the foods that they advertise to children under the age of 12. CFBAI membership of prominent food, beverage and restaurant companies include Burger King, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, McDonalds and Kellogg’s, among other large food industry players.

The updates further aim to strengthen voluntary efforts to help improve child-directed food advertising. Approximately 40 percent of foods on CFBAI’s current Product List do not meet the Revised Criteria and will require reformulation if these foods are to continue to qualify for child-directed advertising after January 1, 2020.

“The Revised Criteria are the latest step in CFBAI’s ongoing commitment to help improve child-directed advertising and encourage healthier food choices. The new criteria reflect meaningful, challenging, and practical changes that will build on the transparency and rigor of the 2011 Criteria,” says Maureen Enright, CBBB Vice President and CFBAI Director.

“Key categories have stricter sodium and added sugars standards, revised whole grain food requirements will help ensure foods contribute a meaningful amount of whole grains, and more food groups are required in the Main Dishes and Meals categories,” she adds.

Key developments in the updated whitepaper:

• The food categories should be more transparent and descriptive. The Revised Criteria include new categories for foods that previously were bundled together in one broad category. The new categories have more rigorous requirements that better recognize the different dietary roles of the foods and their varied nutrient or ingredient compositions, as described by CFBAI.
• To align with the new NFP, CFBAI has adopted an “added sugars” criteria. The new criteria replaces “total sugars” used in the 2011 Criteria.
• Key categories have stricter sodium and added sugars limits, in response to the official US Dietary Guidelines and numerous health organizations which urge Americans to reduce their sodium and added sugars consumption. CFBAI has reduced sodium limits in thirteen of the seventeen categories and estimates that the new added sugar limits represent at least a 10 percent reduction in key categories such as Milks, Cereals, Savory Snacks, Sweet Snacks and Exempt Beverages.

Industry response
CSPI notes that worthy attention has been given to lower sodium and added sugar targets and that the program, over the last decade, has made improvements to its nutrition criteria and the scope of advertising that companies address.

However, it continues to say that CFBAI failed to heed experts’ advice to ensure that all foods marketed to children not only be low in unhealthy components such as salt and sugars but also provide a meaningful amount of healthy constituents such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains, according to CSPI.

Furthermore, junk-food marketing on kids’ media has not declined enough. On Nickelodeon, the most-watched children’s television network, 65 percent of food ads are for unhealthy foods, down from 88 percent in 2005 (the CFBAI program began in 2007), cites CSPI.

Companies should continue to work toward healthier food marketing, by strengthening their nutrition standards and expanding the program to cover all their marketing to children, including all promotions in elementary and secondary schools, characters on packaging and in-store displays, the US consumer group concludes.