How food industry groups used ‘venue hopping’ to weaken UK reform plans

A study finds that food industry trade associations used overlapping UK and Scottish partnerships to soften reform proposals and help overturn targets for healthier products.

Multistakeholder partnerships were meant to bring business, government and civil society into the same room to solve difficult policy problems. But a study published in Regulation & Governance argues that these arrangements can also give well-resourced corporate actors new ways to shape regulation, especially when the same issue is being discussed in more than one forum at once.

Using UK food policy as a case study, the article shows how industry groups used participation in overlapping partnerships to influence efforts to regulate ultra-processed foods. The authors say this was not simply a matter of choosing one preferred venue over another. Instead, they describe a more active strategy in which actors stayed present in several settings, linked them together and used one negotiation to affect another.

The paper focuses on two initiatives: the UK government’s Responsibility Deal and a parallel Food Implementation Group in Scotland. Both were built around the language of collaboration, consensus and voluntary action. According to the authors, that structure made it easier for food industry trade associations to remain involved while pushing back against more demanding proposals, including a calorie reduction pledge and Scottish benchmark targets for reformulation. The research team says the Food and Drink Federation became the main organisational channel through which industry negotiated across both partnerships.

In the UK-level talks, the proposed calorie pledge was gradually softened. The paper says early drafts referred to encouraging consumers to eat and drink fewer calories through product reformulation, smaller portions and changes in promotions. Later versions shifted towards helping customers manage intake through education and information, while placing less emphasis on corporate responsibility. The authors argue that this change reflected not only the industry’s economic interests but also the partnership’s preference for compromise, which allowed companies to present resistance as part of the collaborative process.

The Scottish negotiations followed a similar pattern, but with a different outcome. Officials there explored quantitative targets for reformulating products, including reductions in sugar and saturated fat. Industry groups objected, arguing that companies could not be expected to sacrifice sales or align only with Scotland when standards in England were moving more slowly. By linking the Scottish forum to the Responsibility Deal, the paper says, trade associations were able to present the UK-level process as the more authoritative one and to use that position to weaken ambitions in Scotland. In the end, the Scottish benchmarks were dropped.

The authors introduce the term “venue hopping” to describe this behaviour. They argue that it captures something more specific than classic “venue shopping”, which usually refers to moving an issue to a more favourable institution. Venue hopping, by contrast, describes the use of several overlapping arenas at once, with actors moving between them, maintaining influence in each and drawing one forum into another. In the authors’ view, this matters because soft governance systems such as multistakeholder partnerships often look inclusive on paper while still allowing corporate power to shape outcomes behind the scenes.

The study also raises broader questions about public health policy. According to the authors, multistakeholderism can appear to offer an efficient and pragmatic route to reform, but its emphasis on consensus may favour those with the greatest resources and the strongest organisational capacity. In food policy, that can mean less ambitious rules, more emphasis on individual behaviour and weaker pressure on companies to change the composition or marketing of their products. The paper suggests that the same dynamic could appear in other areas of regulation where business is invited to help design the rules that govern it.