We are committed to doing all we can help to promote healthy lifestyles to children under 18. We believe that learning these skills during development throughout childhood and their teenage years is crucial to living a healthy life as an adult.
We have several policies in place that we are constantly updating to ensure that children are looked after.
Controlling the use of characters
The use of characters and cartoon images on products can influence children. We want to ensure that children and parents don’t feel pressurised or influenced into buying unhealthy products. That’s why we don’t use any characters on our own-brand cereals and have also removed these images from confectionery products.
We’re also funding research and trialling an initiative to focus on how characters and cartoon images can be used as role models to drive healthier habits. We already use these images to positive effect by including them across packaging of products in our Little Ones range, which is designed specifically for infants and young children up to three years of age. The products in this range ensure that children receive all the nutrients they need whilst the characters associated with these products are appealing to children and help parents to promote healthy eating.
We hope that the use of colourful packaging and characters will help to put the fundamentals in place for a healthy lifestyle further down the line.
In 2019 we launched an exciting partnership with Disney, in which we exclusively stocked Disney Heroes collectors’ cards, with our customers receiving two free pack of four cards for every £10 they spend. In a bid to help encourage healthy eating, we also offered customers an extra pack when purchasing our Mini Easy Peelers, mini bananas, mini apples or mini pears.
Disney is one of the world’s most recognisable brands so it is vital that we acknowledge the potential influence these images and characters can have on families and their children – this is why we worked to ensure that unhealthy products weren’t promoted by this partnership.
We’re always looking for new ways to improve our customer experience and to ensure that families can live healthier lives so will continue to overhaul our work around products aimed at children to encourage healthy lifestyles.
Advertising our products
When it comes to advertising, we look to appeal to a diverse range of people across the UK. However, as a general rule children are not our core audience and we look to target adults with messages. For example, on social channels we only advertise to those over the age of 16.
We are committed to helping our customers live healthier lives and this plays a significant role in the messaging of our adverts. When we do feature products, especially where we infer that children are the recipient of the meal, we ensure a balanced portion or meal is shown and all of our advertising is thoroughly reviewed by our nutrition team before going live to ensure everything is nutritionally balanced in what we show.
When featuring HFSS products we only appear in HFSS approved advertising breaks.
Getting kids active
Another important element of helping to promote healthy lifestyles to children is encouraging them to get outside and get active. In 2005, we launched the Active Kids vouchers scheme. Since then Sainsbury’s has donated over £185m worth of equipment and experiences to over 40,000 schools and clubs and provided training for 9,000 teachers across the UK – the largest donation of its kind by a British retailer.
A lot has changed in the time since we launched the vouchers scheme and in 2018 we decided to take a fresh look at how we can keep kids active. Research by our partner ukactive revealed that children’s fitness levels drop off by up to 80% in the summer holidays, so we spoke to parents to find out what would help them keep their kids active when they’re off school. These conversations highlighted there are two key barriers to keeping kids entertained and healthy – cost and a lack of options for kids of all ages in their area.
In 2018, we launched Sainsbury’s Active Kids Holiday Clubs. These clubs have been designed to help children from 5-15 years lead healthier lives, get active, and eat well while enjoying the summer with new friends. The clubs offer a wide range of activities, tailored by age group, including sports such as gymnastics, tennis, cricket, dodgeball and football, alongside arts and crafts, dance and active play. Sainsbury’s Active Kids clubs will offer a week of fun while also helping parents get their children active during the summer holidays. In their second year, the clubs were a resounding success this summer, with over 23,000 children attending and 99.5% of the 111,010 places on offer booked up.