A German supermarket chain wants to ban promoting unhealthy foods to children.
By AFP
LGerman retailer Lidl announced on Tuesday that it would stop advertising “unhealthy” foods aimed at children, and for its own brands, playful packaging of food products intended to appeal to children was banned. The discount aims to promote “marketing of healthy and sustainable nutrition for children”.
From this year, Lidl will no longer advertise “unhealthy foods” to children, the group announced, presenting itself as “the first German food retailer to implement the relevant recommendation of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The next step is to ban colorful, playful visuals from the packaging of its own food brands “by the end of 2025”, illustrated with characters appreciated by young children when the product “does not meet WHO criteria for healthy food”. The measure will be used “with the exception of promotional material for Christmas, Easter and Halloween,” it noted.
The Lidl supermarket chain, the world’s 4th largest retail group by Deloitte, reaches millions of customers every day through 3,200 branches in Germany. Its efforts to provide “nutrition awareness” to its customers are aimed at expanding the range of vegetable proteins and increasing the proportion of whole grains.
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From 2021, the Schwarz Group-owned company will gradually label all of its own brands with a “Nutri-Score”, a five-level scale with colored letters according to the food’s nutritional profile.
The initiative was welcomed by the NGO Foodwatch, which called on its rival German distributor Aldi to follow suit.
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