Three teenagers are walking down aisles of food in a supermarket.

Children's health and food

Community-informed reformulation pilot

We are taking a community-led approach to improving the healthiness of food and drink products with small to medium-sized manufacturers and food businesses.

Key partnership information

  • Partners: EIT Food
  • Funding amount: £400,000
  • Duration: March 2025 to September 2026
  • Programme: Children’s health and food

What we’re doing together

Lambeth and Southwark have some of the most diverse populations in the country, yet healthy and affordable culturally appropriate food is not typically available in the local convenience stores and large supermarkets in these urban neighbourhoods. This means that families instead have to travel to visit specialist stores. In addition, culturally appropriate foods are often left out of mainstream efforts to improve, or reformulate, product recipes to make them healthier.

This pilot seeks to take a community-led approach to reformulating food and drink products. We want to identify food products that families in Lambeth and Southwark regularly buy from their local convenience stores. We then aim to work with small-medium manufacturers and food businesses to reformulate eight of the identified products to be healthier, tailored to local community preferences and yet still affordable.

Aims of the partnership

By the end of the pilot, the aim is to have eight newly reformulated products on the shelves of convenience stores in Lambeth and Southwark.

Throughout this partnership, we want to increase our knowledge about the drivers and barriers and product reformulation, informing how we can best continue to increase the availability of healthier and affordable options. We aim to create case studies of the eight successfully reformulated products, to encourage further reformulation and to influence national reformulation policy.

Connection to our strategy

We invest in partnerships that drive greater accountability, regulation and innovation in the food industry. Through these partnerships, we aim to shift the national food industry to increase access to healthier, affordable and culturally appropriate food.

More about the lead partner, EIT Food:

The project group is being led by EIT Food, with the reformulation work with businesses being carried out by RRSL. A community research partner is currently being recruited.

EIT Food accelerates innovation to build a future-fit food system that produces healthy and sustainable food for all. Supported by the EU, they lead the world’s largest and most dynamic food innovation community. They create connections right across the food system that stimulate new ideas and inventions to drive change. They believe inclusive systems innovation, which enables all people and places to participate and benefit, is essential to a strong food system that is better for everyone. With teams on the ground across Europe, they bridge the gap between countries and regions with low innovation capacity and those leading the way. And they put consumers at the heart of their work, helping build trust by reconnecting them to the origins of their food, directly involving them in the innovation process, and working with the food sector to increase transparency.

Collaboration is central to all their work, which spans the whole food value chain, and is vital to meet the big challenges we face. Together with our community, they will build an innovative and resilient food system that in turn creates a healthier society and planet.

For more information, please visit the EIT Food website.

“The EIT Food team is delighted to join with Impact on Urban Health, RSSL Ltd and Reformul& Scotland to collaborate on this reformulation pilot. Reformulation to lower levels of sugar, salt, calories and saturated fat can improve diets as there is a lower burden on the public to consciously review and sustain changes to what they eat.

We will take a consumer-driven approach, guided by the concept of community-led behavioural change and identify which products families would most like to see reformulated. We will then work with manufacturers to reformulate these products to tailor them to local community preferences and make them healthier.

This pilot has the potential to improve access to affordable healthy and culturally diverse food and create positive long-term health impact, aligned with EIT Food’s Mission: Healthy Lives through Food.”

— EIT Food

Read more about the project

Visit the EIT Food website

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