Commercial baby food has been given 18 months to reduce its sugar and salt, giving the nation’s smallest diners a rare victory over the food industry’s oldest trick: putting a meadow on the packet and hoping nobody checks whether the contents could frost a cupcake.
The new voluntary guidelines cover products aimed at children up to 36 months and call for clearer labelling. Parents are therefore being offered the revolutionary opportunity to understand what they are buying before a toddler has eaten it, rejected it, painted with it and requested the pouch again.
The guidance challenges manufacturers to reduce sugar and salt without using sweeteners. Recipe developers must now search for flavours between boiled despair and birthday cake with plausible deniability, while pretending this was always the plan.
Packaging departments are expected to take the news hardest. The smiling pear, the illustrated carrot and the suspiciously confident leaf have all been asked to explain their relationship with the ingredients panel. The leaf has requested legal representation.
“The pear was aspirational,” said Clementine, Vice President of Infant Mouthfeel. “Our product has never met a pear socially, but it has maintained a meaningful relationship with concentrated fruit.”
The guidelines also target claims that make products appear healthier than they are. The phrase “contains no nasties” is now facing questions about whether it means anything beyond the absence of a small cartoon monster. A label can no longer perform an entire woodland pantomime while the ingredients sit backstage sweating.
Some products marketed as snacks for babies from seven months have also been criticised for conflicting with official advice that children aged six to 12 months do not need snacks between meals. The snack industry is therefore attempting to prove that a child urgently requires something official guidance says the child does not require, which is a bold business model for selling urgency to people who cannot pronounce urgency.
Manufacturers have welcomed the guidance and say they have already reduced sugar while increasing vegetable content. One broccoli floret has reportedly reached middle management, although it remains excluded from decisions involving banana concentrate.
The measures are voluntary, with progress due to be evaluated after 18 months. If the industry fails to act, further measures could follow, a phrase now being studied closely by every pouch hiding behind a vegetable photograph.
After reformulation, the packet will still show a peaceful meadow. It will simply contain less material capable of powering the tractor, leaving the carrot to explain why it has been promoted to chief witness.
Real story: Department of Health and Social Care.
