Calorie cap on hospital convenience stores

Hospitals are to be given extra funding for cracking down on confectionery sales within Hospital grounds, with a 250-calorie cap to be enforced by NHS trusts.

NHS England boss Simon Stevens said a need to fight a “super-size snack culture” is behind the move, which is likely to see sharing bags and large bars taken off the shelves.

A £150m pot will be split between NHS trusts who meet health and wellbeing targets. These targets include reducing sales of confectionery more than 250 calories and soft drinks that contain more than 5g of added sugar per 100ml to 20% of ranged products.

“We want to make healthier food an easy option for hospital staff, patients and visitors,” said Simon Stevens.

The new targets are set to be introduced in April 2018.

Many shops within hospitals already face sales restrictions to encourage healthy eating. Heather Walker and Vikki Padgett run The Ridings Shop inside Dewsbury Hospital where price promotions and checkout displays are already banned.

Discussing the recent changes with Retail Express, Walker comments: “It’s just another slight adjustment. We’ve already gone through a lot of our products to replace high sugar lines with healthier lines or varieties on a smaller pack size. For instance, flapjacks are a popular product for us, we replaced the old size of them with smaller bars with less sugar.”

While the ban only impacts hospital stores, the store owner suggests wider demand for healthier foods is making it easier for retailers to change their range for the good of their customers. She says: “The company we now use for our cakes has a healthier range that allows us to comply with the hospital regulations, it’s not just hospital stores they are doing this for, it’s the demand for healthier goods across the food retail sector.”

There’s evidence that the range changes are working. The Royal Voluntary Service, which runs 440 hospital shops, cafes and trolley services and introduced similar changes earlier this year. The range changes led to a 25% uptick in fruit sales, a 55% increase in healthier food to go, and a 109% boost for savoury snacks.