This 'sugar tax' crap is doing my head in!
- Thread starter MrRockliffe
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That's one approach and no doubt some will do that, but some have reduced the amount of sugar. For example, the sugar added to 7-up has been reduced and now a 330ml can of sugared 7-up "only" contains about the entire recommended daily intake of sugar for an adult.
That's the scale of the problem we have. We're not talking about sugary food or a bit of extra sugar added. We're already way past that stage. We're talking about handfuls of sugar being added. Some measures need to be taken to reduce the problem and since businesses are involved money is one possible approach. Increasing the cost of selling food and drink with extremely high sugar content is a softer approach than directly regulating sugar content and making it illegal to sell food and drink with a sugar content above a certain level.
Reducing serving sizes can be expensive, impractical or undesirable. It's OK with bottles, since it shouldn't be difficult or expensive to adjust a bottling plant to use bottles with a slightly lower capacity and it's likely that most customers won't be particularly bothered by (or even notice, in many cases) a reduction from a 2L bottle to a (for example) 1.85L bottle. Cans would be more of a problem, partly because it's not so simple to change the process and partly because it's more noticeable to customers because of the smaller sizes. The next standard can size down from 330ml is 250ml and the difference is very noticeable. Then there's draught soft drinks, made on demand from concentrate. Changing portion sizes there would be a bother and noticeable to customers. Imagine you ran a pub/club serving 4 brands of soft drink on tap. 2 of them had their serving sized reduced, 2 didn't. So now you need to buy smaller glasses for just the 2 and you and your staff have to always use the right size glass for that particular brand. Not impossible, especially if you're using branded glasses, but extra faff. Also, your customers would notice and you'd get the hassle of that. A and B pay the same amount for a soft drink, but A gets more than B. It would cause hassle. Not for the manufacturers, but for people at the point of sale. People who might decide it would be less trouble to just stop stocking the brands that were reduced in serving size or promote the ones that weren't over the ones that were.
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It doesn't seem like it. The intended purpose of the tax was to suppress sales of high-sugar drinks to a certain degree - around 10-15% has been the norm in other countries that have implemented similar taxes - but the government never expected or intended the soft drinks industry to take the brave/foolhardy move of basically abandoning sugar and jumping wholesale to sweeteners. After all, there's long been plenty of low-sugar drinks available for people who prefer them. That's why they had to slash their forecast of expected tax revenue in half (and I fully expect It'll be revised down again) because the industry response has turned that reduction in sales into an almost complete collapse. I think the government has had a lesson in the law of unintended consequences.
That said, the current situation may not persist in the long term. There's a chance the drinks manufacturers could have provoked a 'New Coke' moment - people want what they're used to and won't buy anything else.
Anecdote alert; I was in a small post office / convenience store on Monday. Bloke in a high-vis jacket comes in, picks an 8-pack of Irn Bru off the shelf and studies the ingredients list. He then chucks the pack back on the shelf and asks at the counter if they have any of the 'full-fat' stuff left. I talked to the shop owner a bit later and she says this is very common, and the sporadic stock of old recipe Irn Bru they can still get sells out immediately. I have no idea if this is a general trend or just something peculiar to Scottish Irn Bru addicts, but...
Additional anecdote alert; I'm partial to the occasional can of Pineapple flavour Old Jamaica soda, which the B&M near my office stocks. In the past it's always been a pain to got hold of as it sells out pretty quickly and the shop doesn't seem to restock until the other flavours have all gone too. But the last couple of times I've been in they only stock the new 'reformulated' version, and the shelves are completely full. Have B&M improved their supply, or is the new stuff not selling? Next quarter's results from the soft drink manufacturers should be proof one way or another.
(as commented back down thread) So do you think think the tax will fail to reduce diabetes ?
cost of diabetes
so that seems about £400 per capita
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How do you tax people who have 10 spoons of sugar in their tea???
Soldato
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Having to drink their tea with a knife and fork is punishment enough.
You don't have to because there are so few of them that it's not a problem. Unlike drinks with huge amounts of sugar in them when they are sold, which many people drink. Similarly, people could buy reduced sugar drinks and a bag of sugar and spoon it in. But very few people will, so it won't be a problem. People could just eat sugar from the bag with a spoon. But very few people will, so it won't be a problem. The issue isn't what a few people do. It's not about raising tax revenue, either. It's a public health issue. The tax is essentially a form of regulation that's softer than setting enforced limits.
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The sugar tax doesn’t affect stuff like milkshakes so I’m guessing more of those will be sold.
I'd say this is a naive view. The government implement policies that actively harm public health, this is a populist move, not a genuine policy for public health. Pure authoritarianism.
which policies ?
Other countries have tried variants of sugar taxes (in addition to previous EU voluntary calory limit on confectionary bars - was it 250?) -
in absence of better proposals, there is a suck it and see aspect to trying new legislation to see if it can reduce the £400 burden diabetes puts on everyone.
I thought this was meant to address dental health too, I don't know how much that costs the
Frijj is lush. Doesn’t matter if it is full of sugar if you are not drinking one every two hours.
Banana Frijj. It’s the future. I’ve tasted it.
Correct. They’re the best milkshake. Soooo thick
strawberry, vanilla or banana. (Chocolate is grim )Just looked and there’s an Irish coffee flavour now. Gotta try that !
frijj is indeed #1 now
liverpool council had the right idea
http://st-anne-stanley-school.co.uk...r-campaign-communications-toolkit-FINAL-1.pdf
why don't we have that on billboards ?
liverpool council had the right idea
http://st-anne-stanley-school.co.uk...r-campaign-communications-toolkit-FINAL-1.pdf
why don't we have that on billboards ?
So yes it's worked perfectly?
They wanted to reduce consumption by 15% but instead have reduced it by 50%?
Win win?
A tax on an added ingredient that's added in farcical quantities and is a part of a huge health problem that costs the country a fortune is not "pure authoritarianism". It's a less authoritarian course of action than simply banning the practice, for example. It may be a populist move, but it's also a genuine policy for public health.
A standard size bottle (400ml) of Banana Frijj contains 38.8g of sugar. The recommended maximum daily recommended intake of sugar for an adult is 30g. So yes, it does matter. Even if you're drinking one every two days rather than every two hours and you drink it in sips spread over the two days rather than all at once, it's still an excessive amount considering the sugar you'd be getting from other sources.
I was in Marks and Spencer's today and they had an entire end section of fizzy drinks not one of which wasn't either reduced sugar or artificial sweeteners. They might have had something back on the non-refrigerated section maybe, but the "meal" drinks were all diet.
A can of drink with less sugar added to it isn't diet. For example, a 330ml can of reduced sugar 7-Up contains 26g of sugar. Almost the entire recommended maximum daily intake for an adult in one 330ml can is very far from being a diet drink.
If a drink contains 39g of sugar instead of the 40g it had before, it's still a "reduced sugar" drink. Even pure sugar syrup would be "reduced sugar" if slightly more water was added.
My workplace contains two bars. Sugary pop outsells diet pop by about 4:1. I think the average would be somewhere in between my workplace and M&S's display (which presumably at least mostly reflects purchases by M&S customers).
The entire middle row was labelled "diet" and I'm pretty sure my meaning is clear - even those not labelled were all reduced sugar.
To be fair 400ml of plain milk would have have half of that (as lactose). I can't imagine 30g of all sugars is what is meant by that guidance - but 30g of added sugar. Thus Frijj has 18g, still a lot. The reduced sugar stuff only has about 5g.