We focus on four complex health issues more prevalent in urban areas
With the Social Progress Imperative, we've developed the first neighbourhood level, health-focused social progress index of its kind.
With Wellcome Trust
We want to hear from you.
Children's health and food • Good Food Programme
Learnings from the pilot phase of the Good Food Programme and ambitions for the next phase.
Everyone deserves access to affordable, nutritious food, no matter where they live. To make this a reality in the UK, we must transform the way we produce, market, and sell food so that our food system supports health.
The places where many children and families – especially those on lower incomes – live, work and play are currently flooded with junk food. Soaring inflation and cost of living pressures have put healthier options out of reach for many. Healthier food now costs three times as much per calorie as unhealthy food, exacerbating dietary and health inequalities. The food industry, policy makers and investors all have a major role to play in tackling this inequity, and the scale and urgency of the changes needed will require collaboration across all parties.
Against this complex backdrop, healthier challenger brands (HCBs) are emerging as a promising force for change. HCBs are food and drink companies that innovate to create healthier products. They are poised to disrupt the food industry by demonstrating that it is possible to produce healthier, tasty, and affordable food. The best known examples are start-ups looking to displace household-name food brands with healthier options.
As mission-driven businesses characterised by their agility and willingness to defy convention, HCBs are able to quickly innovate to launch solutions that meet increasing consumer demand for healthier products.
However, these emerging brands require more support to scale and increase their impact. This is why Mission Ventures and Impact on Urban Health formed a unique, cross-sector partnership to establish The Good Food Programme. The programme helps healthier challenger brands and novel food technologies to break through and scale, with the aim of displacing well-established, unhealthier products in families’ shopping baskets.
This report sets out learnings from the pilot phase of The Good Food Programme, and our ambitions for the next phase.
We also showcase stories and calls to action from HCBs and established companies across the food industry, as well as from investors, young people and policymakers. We demonstrate how innovation throughout the food industry can improve access to healthier food for everyone, no matter their budget.
This disruptive group of businesses support the movement for a healthier food system in a variety of ways:
At Impact on Urban Health, we aim to break the persistent link between living on a lower income and experiencing health and dietary inequalities.We invest in projects that make eating well the easiest – not the hardest – thing to do, and in 2019 we began exploring the role innovation and start-ups could play towards this mission.
We commissioned the Healthier Returns research jointly with Big Society Capital and the Food Foundation, which demonstrated:
Building on these findings, Impact on Urban Health and Big Society Capital established a pilot programme that supported 13 HCBs to enter the market and grow, with a business support programme managed by food industry experts Mission Ventures and an equity fund managed by Ascension Ventures.
You can read more about the restrictions here and here.
“For us at Big Society Capital it was really important to test through this pilot how and in what ways social investment could tackle the problem of dietary inequalities.
We had done our research with Impact on Urban Health, but there were still questions we didn’t have an answer to. The pilot was so important to inform what a larger scale proposition should look like and answered questions like: what kind of financial and non-financial support do these ventures need to scale? And, most importantly: is it possible for healthier, convenient food to be offered at an affordable price point, and, do families living on lower income switch to these products? We have learnt that yes, it is possible to get these products to an accessible price point and there are positive signs of switching behaviour.”
– Hayley Hand, Investment Director, Big Society Capital
Our pilot set out to test whether it was possible to support HCBs to offer healthier, convenient, and tasty products to all families, no matter their budget. We gained promising evidence that this was possible, and we became more familiar with the challenges facing these brands. We now know that:
Our pilot programme learned how to effectively address these barriers, and we built the next iteration of the programme to respond in an intentional and structured way.
The next phase of the Good Food Programme launched in August 2022. To address the challenges outlined above, the programme further builds on Mission Ventures’ in-depth understanding of the food industry, and galvanises action from across the food industry and from policymakers.
The main challenge the Good Food Programme tackles is bringing healthier products to an accessible price point, which typically requires brands to reach mass distribution to reduce prices. The Good Food Programme aims to shortcut this process by supporting brands to design their products with a clear pathway to affordability and scalability that always keeps health in mind. The updated programme sees Mission Ventures leverage its extensive industry knowledge and networks to work closely with 10 HCBs over two years through a longer, more tailored, targeted business support programme.
Mission Ventures brings consumer insights into the process early on so that brands can gain clarity on what value their products offer consumers. Consumer insight panels, which the brands in pilot noted as hugely important to their journey, convene a diverse range of voices, in particular families living on lower incomes. The brands develop products that appeal to all consumers, not just wealthier households, which is atypical for HCBs.
The new iteration of the programme also offers a £15,000 grant. In January 2022, we conducted research with the founders of 50 FMCG businesses under five years old. 70% of participants told us that they spent between £0 – £20,000 to start their business, and more than 70% either self-funded or raised this from friends and family. We have included the grant funding to kick-start innovation and attract entrepreneurs who might not have access to early-stage funding from their networks.
We also measure and evaluate our impact by working with the Behavioural Insights Team. They support us from recruitment – by developing a health impact assessment of each potential brand – and will work with us throughout the full programme to track brand sales and growth and if consumers are actually switching to the Good Food Programme products.
Most importantly, the next phase of the programme goes beyond acceleration support and seeks to use our unique insights to mobilise action across the food industry and with policymakers to collaborate with us. We want to raise the public profile of healthier challenger brands, demonstrate the role innovation can play, and develop partnerships that support coordinated action towards improving health.
To achieve these goals, we take a targeted and data-driven approach evaluating potential impact and progress. We analyse the data to identify categories that represent potential value to retailers and investors but lack affordable and healthier options. Research we conducted with Kantar ahead of our recruitment drive in summer 2022 identified categories where families on lower incomes spent as much or more than wealthier households:
Download the full clean data (.xslx file)
Going forward, we will continue to identify agile brands that can disrupt these categories, offering value to consumers, retailers, and investors and present a blueprint to more established manufacturers on how to bring healthier options to market.
“ Healthy challenger brands play an important role across all of our activities. One of the reasons we were such a big supporter of the HFSS legislation was that we knew it would bring huge innovation to the market. It has driven so much good thinking. It’s not just been about making tipping-point products healthier, we’ve also seen new brands come to market and a change in how customers think about products in categories like snacks and drinks. Oonagh Turnbull Head of Health and Sustainable Diet Campaigns at Tesco
Healthy challenger brands play an important role across all of our activities. One of the reasons we were such a big supporter of the HFSS legislation was that we knew it would bring huge innovation to the market. It has driven so much good thinking. It’s not just been about making tipping-point products healthier, we’ve also seen new brands come to market and a change in how customers think about products in categories like snacks and drinks.
Read more about Oonagh’s perspective here >
HCBs and innovators play a role in driving a healthier future for food and drink, but they can’t do it alone. There is a strong and consistent message being shared by stakeholders committed to action on health – the need for greater collaboration and the creation of a coordinated approach to improving access to healthier food for all.
For this report, we gathered a range of different perspectives about innovation and transformation in the food industry. Read on to find out more about the work different industry players and policymakers are taking to improve health and reduce dietary inequalities.
We’re also very excited to bring you the short videos below, which bring two founders from the pilot phase in conversation with each other. Rushina Shah, founder of Insane Grain, and Anthony Fletcher, founder of Urban Legends chat to each other about their entrepreneurial journeys, why they focus on health and the support they need to build their businesses.
“I was just another person in a corporate. For me, it was about starting a business that actually did good” – Rushina Shah
“Being around the programme and Mission Ventures, and gaining their insights on what works and what doesn’t it really sped up my progress”– Rushina Shah
“I’ve always found the retailers receptive. They’ve always wanted to sell healthier products but at the same time they’ve got to run a business. I’ve always felt it’s the manufacturers who are best placed to solve this problem. But it often falls to entrepreneurs to come up with the products that sell to consumers” – Anthony Fletcher
“Our big challenge right now is raising investment and making sure that investors are supporting challenger brands and brands with a real mission” – Rushina Shah
“I really believe that HFSS and the legislation is going to unlock a golden decade of innovation in the UK” – Anthony Fletcher
To quote Matt Truman, we call on the whole food industry – from retailers, to manufacturers, to investors – and on government – to ‘be brave and set robust ambitions and strategies for health’. We need to see the following change:
Louis Bedwell, Managing Director at Mission Ventures or Alisha Mulhall, Portfolio Manager, Impact on Urban Health
In partnership with