Welcome to our pilot project to influence meaningful change at some of the UK’s biggest food companies.

At Bite Back 2030, we believe that everyone should be able to access healthy food, no matter where they live. Right now, that’s not the case.

Our world is flooded with unhealthy food. It pours out from our high streets, supermarket shelves and school canteens. Junk food is more available and affordable than healthy food options, and millions are spent on marketing to ensure these foods stay firmly in the spotlight. In short, our food system is rigged against us. It’s time to make a change, and put our health first.

But changing a whole system isn’t going to be easy. Many food businesses are resistant to change. Those that say they want to do better are held back from making progress for a few reasons: no one wants to go first; they’re worried that it might not work, or they’ll lose money; or there just aren’t enough senior people inside their companies passionate about driving change.

We need the Government to step in and make new regulations — but they’re too slow to act. So we’ve taken matters into our own hands. We want to explore if connecting young people with leading food companies can help change things quicker, and our health will benefit.

In 2022, Bite Back launched a pilot programme to do exactly that. Our Youth Board members teamed up with senior staff from Chartwells, Costa, Danone, Deliveroo, Innocent, Jamie Oliver Group, KFC, and Tesco.

Together, we ran in-depth workshops to map each company’s role in the food system, and engaged them through youth insight sessions. Our young activists also got the chance to speak directly to the people making the decisions at their corporate HQs.

Supported by Nesta, we worked closely with those eight businesses to agree some change goals to be achieved – or at least piloted – in 2023. We based these goals on evidence,.

They included some high impact pilots, such as testing out how marketing could help cut back the calories in the average order, or shift sales to products that aren’t high in fat, sugar or salt. But they also included simpler things, like offering more healthier options, or producing new variants of drinks.

Together, the businesses signed a joint statement pledging their commitment to children’s health. They highlighted how important Government regulation will be to create a level playing field, so the whole food sector can make changes across their marketing, labelling, and the products themselves. We kept working with six of the original businesses in 2023 to help make the change goals happen, and to check how well they’re working.

Financial statement

Each business pays a contribution of £10,000-15,000 to participate in the programme. This fully covers the costs of external facilitation of the programme by LeadersQuest, plus external event and research costs. No funding is retained by Bite Back 2030.

The Bite Back team’s time, and expenses for the Youth Board, are covered by a grant from the Rothschild Foundation. We are also grateful to the Rothschild Foundation for providing Waddesdon Manor as a venue for the programme.