Cutting Back on Salt

This week is the 17^th Annual Salt Awareness Week organised by Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH).  Since CASH first started Salt Awareness Week 17 there has been significant progress in salt reduction in food and in the diet of the UK population.  That’s a good result from a health perspective as too much salt can increase risk of high blood pressure and heart disease, but the majority of us still eat more than the recommended 6g per day.

At M&S we started our salt reduction programme in 1998 by looking into bread recipes, at a time when the health issues of too much salt in the diet were just starting to be highlighted.  From that point on we have continued to have an active salt reduction programme across all our food, alongside reviewing the saturated fat, added sugar and calorie content where we can as part of the product development process. 

We will only reduce salt or continue to reduce it in products where there is no compromise in quality or safety of the product, as our food must meet the high standards our customers expect from us.

We have made good progress on the 2017 targets; we meet 35 out of the 65 categories including areas that are highlighted as contributing most salt in the diet e.g. bread, sandwiches, bacon and are making good progress in the majority of other areas, as you will see from the below progress report.  There are challenges however in meeting some of the 2017 targets - some of which are for food safety reasons e.g. ham and cured meat, uncured meat, cured meat topped pizzas, uncured meat and some for quality reasons e.g.  pies, sausage rolls and premium burgers, but we will continue to review salt and make progress where we can.

In the past there has been some criticism about “hidden” salt in foods.  We provide clear, colour-coded front of pack nutrition labelling on our products to help our customers put the salt content of a specific food into the context of the recommended daily intake of 6g per day. 

We’d also like to see a change in how progress is reported; in some product areas e.g. crisps we believe that per 100g targets are not necessarily the right way to report the nutrition content of food.  We know that this approach allows comparatives from a nutrition science perspective but consumers do not eat food in 100g portions.  As the broader Department of Health and Public Health England Obesity Strategy will look at portion sizes, we need to ensure that this is captured in nutrition data and reformulation achievements.

The real challenge for us all is instead of focusing on individual nutrients, how do we get more people eating a healthy balanced diet?  There is no simple answer to this and it needs to be delivered through collaborations academics, industry and Governments.

M&S Salt Data by Category Report: March 2017