Tesco : Our position on energy drinks

26 Jan 2018

Tesco is committed to making it easier for customers and colleagues to live healthier lives. Our Little Helps Plan includes a focus on health.

We've been reformulating our own brand products to reduce sugar, fat and salt since 2011, and were the first retailer to reformulate our soft drinks, including energy drinks, to have less than 5g of sugar per 100ml.

In 2014 we removed sweets and chocolates from our checkouts across all store formats. We've also introduced Free Fruit for Kids in over800 Tesco stores across the UK to help create healthy eating habits among kids that will stay with them as they grow up. We've given away over 48 million pieces of fresh fruit to children since 2016.

With millions of customers across the UK shopping with us every week and 300,000 colleagues working in our stores, centres and offices, implementing new measures on energy drinks is another opportunity to help our customers adopt healthy habits.

Since 2013 energy drinks have not been marketed or promoted to under-16s and all energy drinks carry a recommendation that they are not for children.However, our customers tell us that they would like more help in stopping children buying thesedrinks, so we willintroducemeasures to prevent the sale of energy drinks to children in the UK from March 2018.We know that this isn't easy to implement, so in addition,we willcreate awareness in store and online to highlight that high-energy drinks are notrecommendedfor children, supporting the #notforchildren campaign.

Earlier this month, we launched a new partnership with Cancer Research UK, Diabetes UK and the British Heart Foundation which aims to support colleagues, customers and their families to make sustainable lifestyle changes and adopt healthy habits.

We hope thissmall step is a little help to make healthier choices.