Prevalence of Child-Directed Marketing on Breakfast Cereal Packages before and after Chile’s Food Marketing Law: A Pre- and Post-Quantitative Content Analysis

Abstract

Food marketing has been identified as a contributing factor in childhood obesity, prompting global health organizations to recommend restrictions on unhealthy food marketing to children. Chile has responded to this recommendation with a restriction on child-directed marketing for products that exceed certain regulation-defined thresholds in sugars, saturated fats, sodium, or calories. Child-directed strategies are allowed for products that do not exceed these thresholds. To evaluate changes in marketing due to this restriction, we examined differences in the use of child-directed strategies on breakfast cereal packages that exceeded the defined thresholds vs. those that did not exceed the thresholds before (n = 168) and after (n = 153) the restriction was implemented. Photographs of cereal packages were taken from top supermarket chains in Santiago. Photographed cereals were classified as “high-in” if they exceeded any nutrient threshold described in the regulation. We found that the percentage of all cereal packages using child-directed strategies before implementation (36%) was significantly lower after implementation (21%), p < 0.05. This overall decrease is due to the decrease we found in the percentage of “high-in” cereals using child-directed strategies after implementation (43% before implementation, 15% after implementation), p < 0.05. In contrast, a greater percentage of packages that did not qualify as “high-in” used child-directed strategies after implementation (30%) compared with before implementation (8%), p < 0.05. The results suggest that the Chilean food marketing regulation can be effective at reducing the use of child-directed marketing for unhealthy food products.

The Power of Packaging: A Scoping Review and Assessment of Child-Targeted Food Packaging

“…When it comes to age studied, no consistency is found in terms of age range used across the studies. For example, some studies include participants ranging from age 1-12 [19], 0-13 [52], and 0-16 [53], respectively, while others focus solely on age four [55], age six [65], or span five years [11,42,49]. The most frequently studied ages in the child populations identified fall between two and 12 years (42%).…”

“…Sample sizes in the content analyses vary substantially, ranging from 69 products up to 1005, and the studies examine different categories of food (from cereal, to candy, to beverages, to pastries and cookies), making comparison across studies inappropriate. Some studies analyse all child-directed foods found in the supermarket [9], while others analyse the "regular" foods that have been repackaged to appeal to children, specifically excluding "junk food" (such as confectionary/candy/chocolate, sugary sodas and salty snacks) [22,23,26,30]; and some isolate specific categories or types of food-such as cereals [50,52,54,57,63], beverages [51] or snack food, confectionary and "dairy snacks"/ice cream [18] (See Table 2).…”

Sugar Content and Nutritional Quality of Child Orientated Ready to Eat Cereals and Yoghurts in the UK and Latin America; Does Food Policy Matter?

“…Food-specific sugar reduction policies have been implemented in some Latin American countries, although in Mexico and Ecuador, the existing sugar reduction policy has been mainly focused on sugar-sweetened beverages [5,6,47]. Other policies such as a new front-of-pack warning labelling system focused on energy, sugars, saturated fats and sodium have recently been approved by the Federal Executive in Mexico to encourage reformulation of food and beverage products.…”

Interpreters of International Economic Law: Corporations and Bureaucrats in Contest over Chile's Nutrition Label

“…For instance, the regulation has led to a 24 percent drop in purchases of beverages high in sugar (Taillie et al 2020). It has also led to a substantial reduction of child‐directed marketing for unhealthy food products (Mediano Stoltze et al 2019). While these early results do not yet capture the regulation's long‐term effects on the prevalence of obesity and diet‐related NCDs, public health experts agree that the Chilean regulation is a major step toward healthier “food environments” (e.g., Ralston 2018).…”