SALIENT (food System triALs for Impact on Environment, Nutrition and healTh)

The UK food system is neither sufficiently healthy nor sustainable. Poor diet is the second-leading cause of death and ill health in the UK. The number of food banks in the country is increasing, yet cheaper food is often more energy dense, less nutritious and less sustainable. The gap between diet-related diseases in richer and poorer households is widening. UK food consumption is responsible for about one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions, and industrialised farming practices are reducing biodiversity.

The UK government commissioned a National Food Strategy to plot a course towards healthy, sustainable food provision and consumption. The 2021 report described how the UK is caught in a Junk Food Cycle, which ensures that less healthy, less sustainable foods are cheaper to produce and consume. To break this cycle we need action to push people towards healthier, more sustainable food purchasing behaviour. These actions will need to change the spaces where we make food-purchasing decisions, so that healthy, sustainable foods become the easier option for all.

The SALIENT project will work with the public, policymakers and food system partners to design tools and actions that can increase purchasing of healthy, sustainable foods. We will then test what impact this has in real-life food purchasing settings. This will give us an understanding not only of what works but how and why it works. For the SALIENT project, we will work in three settings that involve the majority of food purchasing decisions in the UK: retail, catering and community support (e.g. food banks and local authority help).

In the co-design phase of SALIENT, we will identify the interventions that we will study during the delivery phase of the project. We will conduct a review of evidence to discover what types of intervention in different settings are likely to be most effective at changing purchasing behaviour. We will use this evidence review to develop a list of possible interventions that have been prioritised on the basis of three criteria: how effective might they be at changing behaviour; how much reach might they have in the population; and what impacts might they have on health, sustainability and inequalities.

We will hold workshops with two public panels to get feedback on our prioritised list of interventions. We will explore which interventions are supported by the public and why, and learn lessons about how to deliver interventions to increase their likely impact. We will also work with a panel of policymakers from relevant government departments to get their insight into our prioritised interventions.

We have an existing network of food system partners who we will work with during the co-design phase. These include both large and small organisations working in the retail, catering and community support sectors. We will add to this network of partners by liaising with the panel of policymakers. We will then hold two workshops with each of our food system partners in turn. The first workshop will be focussed on the design of interventions, and the second will focus on plans for evaluating the interventions in real-life food settings. Our evaluations will use the most rigorous design for each context.

After the workshops, the SALIENT project team will hold a two-day meeting to prepare our study plans for the delivery phase. The objective of this meeting will be to identify a coherent set of interventions for study in the delivery phase of the project, and to plan protocols for these evaluation studies.