Our diets are heavily influenced by the food that’s available to us and, with 67% of adults in Scotland living with excess weight, we need a raft of measures to help improve our diets.

One of the ways we can do this is to make small changes to the food that we are eating most frequently - through reformulation. Reformulating foods can involve altering ingredients to reduce high quantities of salt, sugar and fat or changing cooking processes to reduce calorie content.

Reformulation doesn’t require people to buy less of the things they enjoy but it can make the foods we eat and enjoy more healthy and help reduce the amount of excess calories we eat – especially if we target the sorts of foods we are buying every day.

There’s strong consumer support for reformulation when it aims to improve the healthiness of food with 83% of consumers supporting these changes.

In order to establish the scope of potential reformulation activity on the calorie content of food produced and sold in Scotland, we worked with the Food and Drink Federation Scotland, through its Scottish Government-funded Reformulation for Health programme, and food and drink consultants Levercliff, to investigate the scale and make up of Scottish food manufacturing.

We carried out an audit of the manufacturers which were present in, and most prominent across, the retail and wholesale sectors. This involved identifying Scottish manufacturers who supplied the top seven retailers and the top three wholesalers in Scotland using in store and online audits of the products sold.

Products were identified and recorded in 9 of the 10 categories identified via Nesta’s previous research (which had highlighted the categories contributing most to calorie consumption and therefore had greatest potential for reformulation).

The categories confectionery, crisps and snacks, sweet biscuits and ready meals are the largest by sales value across Great Britain. Sales of ready meals are higher in Scotland than in Great Britain as a whole and Scottish consumers spend disproportionately more on products in the ambient cakes category too.

In total, 53 Scottish food manufacturers producing a total of 546 different products were identified.

We narrowed our focus to the largest brands (by brand value and share of the market) across the categories suited to reformulation. This resulted in the identification of four Scottish food brands with a value of more than £8 million per year and a share of over 5% of the total food manufacturing market in Scotland.

Focusing on popular products from these four manufacturers led to us prioritising the categories of savoury pastries, chilled ready meals, sweet biscuits and ambient cakes.

Across these four categories (as opposed to the whole market) the brands have a collective market share of 32% and a collective sales value of £59.5 million – representing the greatest potential for impact on calorie consumption via reformulation.

In three of the four categories (savoury pastries is the exception) reformulated products were also identified and the sales analysed, as was consumer demand for healthier products.

• In the ambient cakes category, 26% of consumers said they were influenced to buy products with reduced sugar
• 20% of consumers said they seek ready meals or ready-to-cook foods which are “low in bad-for-you nutrients, such as saturated fat and salt”
• In the sweet biscuit category, 49% of consumers would like to see products begin to reduce fat and sugar contents

(Mintel, Ready Meals and RTC Foods, UK, 2023)

Savoury pastries is a category in Scotland that is yet to embrace reformulated lines – products are meat-based or vegan with the vegan options containing insignificant differences in calories. Nonetheless there is significant innovation potential to create healthier pies and pasties by focusing on incremental changes or more radical product development.

The research demonstrates the potential in each of these categories to reformulate products without impacting on taste or satisfaction by reducing fats and sugars, reducing portion sizes or replacing ingredients for healthier options.

Reformulation offers Scottish food manufacturers an opportunity to increase the healthiness of their popular products, contributing to reducing excess weight and obesity in Scotland, without impacting on sales.

Our analysis shows, if we were to reformulate the food products produced in Scotland by the 53 manufacturers across the nine categories by lowering calories by just 5%, it would translate to a reduction of 2 kcals per person per day in Scotland. If that rose to a reduction of 10% it would mean 3.5 kcals and at 20% it would mean 7 kcals – changes that would likely go unnoticed at an individual level. However, based on the sales and market share of these popular products, across the population the total calories removed from the nation's diets would be almost 3.5 billion and 14 billion per year, respectively. This figure would further increase if also considering the sales of these products outside Scotland.

This may sound like a small figure and there would naturally be challenges to engaging all manufacturers in reformulation activity, but by layering multiple interventions and policies, which might individually only have a modest impact but together can create significant changes to our food environment, we can start to tackle obesity and support healthy weight for all.

Reformulation is one of a raft of potential measures that can help reduce excess calorie intake and support improved health and it is necessarily an incremental change.

The research has highlighted the scale and breadth of the food manufactured in Scotland for the retail and wholesale sectors and the as yet unmet potential for reformulation across popular food categories. The Food and Drink Federation Scotland’s Reformulation for Health programme is working to fill this gap and increase the number of manufacturers reformulating their products to improve health. This work will help to focus reformulation activity on products, brands and manufacturers which will have the greatest impact. These approaches to reformulation may be generalisable across a range of different products and categories and therefore if adopted widely would help to scale the impact of reformulation and strengthen the case for national policy at a Scottish or UK level.

This is Nesta’s first research project with FDFS’s Reformulation for Health programme and we hope to develop this research further and work with Scottish manufacturers directly to develop ways they can help contribute to improving the nation’s health.