Collaborating for the future to improve children's health

Our environments, the physical and social structures that surround us as we grow up, shape us. They shape who we become as adults, how we live and even show love to our families. Our food environments shape us even more literally than that. They have a huge influence on what we eat, how we eat it and when we eat it.

As an urban health foundation, we’re learning about how to positively change food environments to tackle childhood obesity. This includes big and small environments: from supermarkets to takeaways and from school canteens to home kitchens.

There’s a growing body of evidence showing that small improvements to ‘default’ options can make a profound difference. By making the default option the healthier, more affordable and accessible option we can improve the health of all children, regardless of where they grow up or their household income. This is crucial in addressing the ‘childhood obesity inequality gap’; childhood obesity is strongly linked to income, due to unequal access to food environments that enable nutritious diets.

By making the default option the healthier, more affordable and accessible option we can improve the health of all children, regardless of where they grow up or their household income.

Partnering with food companies to drive impact

It’s for these reasons that we’re supporting The Consumer Goods Forum’s Collaboration for Healthier Lives initiative, testing and learning what works to improve food retail environments in our two inner-city South London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark.

We joined the collaboration 18 months ago to support these national and international food manufacturers and retailers. Through this partnership we’ve provided a place to test interventions: two boroughs with a total population of 600,000 is a good size to test innovations and it’s an area typical of other urban areas with high health and income inequality making it a good place to learn from in order to scale what works. We’ve provided deep insight about the population in conjunction with behavioural insights expertise and are supporting elements of the evaluation.

Being a partner on the collaboration over the last 18 months I’ve learnt what it really means to collaborate as a group of manufacturers and retailers. Our ambition for the group is to rapidly learn together about how to nudge healthier options in store, what works to both make an impact on health and retain commercial value, stopping but still sharing the things that don’t work, and scaling the things that do.