A food and soft drink company wants more regulation of ultra-processed food. They have received a surprising amount of praise for this blatant rent-seeking, as I discuss in The Critic.
According to the Observer, it once owned “popular biscuits brands, including Lu biscuits, but sold its biscuit and cereal snack unit to Kraft Food in 2007”. It now boasts that “90 per cent of its UK portfolio of products by sales volume is not high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS)”. The key phrase here is “by sales volume”. As the owner of two of the UK’s top selling mineral water brands, this is less impressive than it sounds.
The good people at Danone UK & Ireland may be sincere in their belief that Britain has “reached a point where meaningful intervention from the government is a necessary course of action.” But nobbling your competitors with taxes and bans looks rather like regulatory capture and corporate rent-seeking.
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