Junk Food Brands: Stop targeting kids 14 and younger

By: Arianne Corbett, RD
Leading Health, LLC

Tracy Fox, MPH, RD, President
Food, Nutrition & Policy Consultants, LLC

The food and beverage industry spends nearly $2 billion annually marketing mostly unhealthy products to children.  While industry self-regulation, over the last decade, has resulted in some progress in reducing unhealthy food advertising, the self-regulatory initiative is not comprehensive enough to put a significant dent in reducing unhealthy food marketing to kids.  The evidence is mounting that marketing of high-calorie and nutrition-poor foods to children and adolescents increases their risk of unhealthy weight gain and contributes to poor diet-related health outcomes. As a result, the widespread marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children and youth is a major public health concern.

The Recommendations for Responsible Food Marketing to Children were developed by a national panel of experts convened by Healthy Eating Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to provide model definitions for food marketing practices directed to children. The panel of 17 experts in the fields of nutrition, marketing, communications, and health policy, deliberated over 14 months to develop these comprehensive recommendations intended to provide guidance to a broad range of stakeholders, including the food and beverage industry, media companies, policymakers, advocates, and researchers. 

The experts concluded that kids 14 and younger should be protected from junk food marketing – not just kids age 11 and younger, which is the age to which most companies’ policies apply. The expert panel also recommends that audiences of a media program or venue be considered child-directed if children make up 25 percent of the audience or more, as opposed to the 35 percent threshold typically used by companies with food marketing policies.

The panel recommends that marketing or advertising directed at kids should be considered as such, whether or not the marketing or advertising appears in child-directed programming or venues. For example, an ad with child-oriented animation, games, characters, or other kid-targeted characteristics should be covered by company marketing policies no matter in which programs they are shown. And brands that are marketed to children should only contain products that meet nutrition criteria, the panel says. Many marketing efforts aimed at children show brief images of products that meet nutrition criteria, but place greater emphasis on the brand itself, which may be made up of mostly junk foods.

Food packaging, in-store displays, toy premiums, middle and high schools, and company-owned characters like “Tony the Tiger” are generally not covered by company policies on food marketing to children. The expert panel recommends that food and beverages advertised by those approaches meet nutrition criteria. Children are uniquely vulnerable to the wide array of marketing practices and tactics that surround them and need stronger protections from unhealthy child-directed food marketing than are currently in place. These recommendations provide an evidence-based and more comprehensive framework to define food marketing directed to children and will assist stakeholders as they work to create healthy food environments for all children.