Committee publication · Correspondence · 11 March 2026

Correspondence form Asda- Follow up on 28 Jan session

Summary

Beth Fowler, Head of Healthy and Sustainable Diets at Asda, provides written follow-up to the committee's 28 January 2026 session. Asda details two decades of voluntary health initiatives—including product reformulation, nutrition labelling, and a partnership with Nesta on healthy sales metrics—and raises substantial concerns about transitioning from the 2004/05 to 2018/19 Nutrient Profiling Model, citing technical infeasibility, data gaps on free sugars, and millions in reinvestment costs.

Key findings

Asda claims the 2018/19 NPM relies on free sugars data that cannot be measured objectively, lacks standardised methodology, and would require extensive system redevelopment across tens of thousands of products.
Asda reports improving its healthy sales score from 1.83 (2023) to 1.77 (2024) using the 2004/05 NPM and warns that transition to 2018/19 would halt this progress programme for several years.
Asda states compliance with existing HFSS legislation would require dual NPM operation and millions in store capital investment, compounding recent Extended Producer Responsibility costs (October 2025) and upcoming regulatory burdens.
Asda argues price-per-calorie metrics are misleading because healthy foods are inherently less energy-dense; instead monitors price differences between healthiest (NPM ≤−1) and least healthy products (NPM ≥19) across 52-week periods.
Asda maintains that advertising in mature UK markets shifts spend between brands rather than growing overall consumption, and applies internal nutrition guardrails and compliance with CAP/BCAP codes to product-led communications.

Tone

Adversarial

Topics

food-standardsnutrition-policypublic-healthregulatory-complianceretail

Key actors

Beth Fowler, Asda, Health and Social Care Select Committee, Layla Moran MP, Nesta, Department of Health and Social Care, Public Health England, Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition

Notable line

“… the 2018/19 NPM is not a viable basis for mandatory reporting or regulatory targets.”

Key Quotes

“Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before the Health and Social Care Select Committee recently. I hope my evidence was useful and demonstrated how seriously Asda takes the topic of food and weight management.”
— Beth Fowler · Opening gratitude and framing Asda's position on food and weight management

“The inclusion of free sugars in the 2018/19 model represents a fundamental challenge as this information is not available across our value chain and not a requirement under labelling regulations.”
— Asda · Core technical objection to the 2018/19 NPM transition

“To our knowledge, there is no recognised objective analytical method for determining free sugars , and any estimation requires multiple manual assumptions about sugar content of ingredients and processing.”
— Asda · Challenging the feasibility of free sugars measurement

“During any transition period, work on our healthy baskets programme would necessarily pause. We would be unable to define, measure or evaluate progress while operating between two incompatible models.”
— Asda · Explaining operational disruption from dual-model operation

“We expect any reinvestment required by a model change to be in the millions.”
— Asda · Quantifying financial burden of compliance with 2018/19 NPM

“A simple percentage of healthy versus less healthy sales would not adequately capture the relative contribution of different products.”
— Asda · Defending the three-component healthy sales metric methodology

“… by the nature of their composition, healthy foods are less energy dense and will always perform poorly on a price per calorie metric and HFSS products will perform well as they're energy dense.”
— Asda · Rejecting price-per-calorie as a meaningful affordability measure

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Source · parliament.uk record ↗