Our Research

Unhealthy eating practices associated with obesity and weight gain are influenced by a range of interacting factors, including but not limited to, ease of access to unhealthy food, financial insecurity and prompts in food environments. These diverse drivers of dietary behaviour cross the remit of numerous government departments, from health to education and environment. However, different departments understandably have different priorities and metrics which drive their work, potentially resulting in a lack of policy coherence across government. A first step in supporting the development of coherent food policy is to undertake a policy coherence analysis.

The purpose of a policy coherence analysis is to understand how existing food policy interacts across government in order to support synergies and interconnections between economic, social, health and environmental policy areas. The rational for this proposed research, therefore, is to understand food policy coherence within the UK and to determine how government policy could be better aligned to address the drivers of obesity. This will be achieved through a series of in-depth collaborative interviews with civil servant and policy makers both within DHSC and other government departments. This project is led by Prof Christina Vogel and Dr Anna Isaacs.

A wealth of good practice exists among local food partnerships, recognised by the national Sustainable Food Places (SFP) network. SFP provides a platform for sharing local knowledge, making bronze, silver and gold awards to acknowledge the excellent work being done ‘on the ground’, often with very limited resources. This project aims to support these developments, sharing good practice through a process of co-production and horizontal knowledge exchange, working with three local food partnerships at different stages of development: Bristol Food Network already has a gold award; ShefFood has a bronze award and is currently bidding for silver; and Rotherham Food Network is working towards a bronze award. The project aims to understand how the work of local food partnerships can be ‘scaled up’ to achieve transformative impact at the national scale. The project lead at City St George’s is Dr Christopher Yap.

This research project aims to expand and enhance the piloted Household Simulation Model (HHSM). To achieve this it will simulate the impact of interventions on plastic packaging and food waste generation practices for a range of key food products, differentiating between different household/demographic types and modelling a greater range of interventions and product changes. It will incorporate the assessment of plastic packaging changes and food waste reduction trade-offs with environmental and economic impact metrics. Key to its success is building a network/user base of academics, policymakers, and industry stakeholders for the HHSM and its outputs. You can find out more on the project website.

The project is a collaboration between the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s University London, and the Universities of Sheffield Centre for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (CEES) | CEES | The University of Sheffield, Greenwich Natural Resources Institute – Home Page (nri.org) and Kent Growing Kent & Medway – Research at Kent. This Enabling research in smart sustainable plastic packaging (SSPP) – UKRI project is led by Dr Christian Reynolds, supported by Adrian White, project manager.

The Centre for Food Policy is leading on the policy component of the SHEFS project with the objective of identifying how policy can enable both sustainability and health in food systems in South Africa, India and the UK. It involves engagement and co-creation of solutions with policy-makers to address food system challenges, through formats like Transformation labs. This project is being conducted in partnership with London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University College London, University of Aberdeen, the Food Foundation, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Centre for Chronic Disease Control, The Royal Veterinary College, the School of Oriental and African Studies and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. It is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The initiative aims to provide an overview of how the food system could leverage its transformational power towards improving diets, recognizing the interconnections and competing demands of other food systems goals; taking environmental, gender, and economic factors into consideration. The outputs of this initiative will be practical and actionable resources to inform decision-making by policymakers and funders. They will include a compendium of evidence and practical policy briefs on how existing food system policies have played out to influence diets in different contexts, identifying synergies and unintended consequences. Different sources of evidence will be integrated, such as scientific studies, policy analysis, practical examples, and lived experiences.

We will convene an advisory group to ensure our outputs are comprehensive, high quality, practical and useable by the food systems policy community. We are working in partnership with Results for Development (R4D) and have been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The project aims to identify actions to reorient food systems towards environmental sustainability and improved nutrition, while protecting livelihoods. It represents the second phase of the project “42 policies and actions to orient food systems towards healthier diets for all”, co-led by the CFP, GAIN, and Johns Hopkins University. Combining expert input with recommendations made in international reports on food systems, the team will compile a menu of potential options for increasing the environmental sustainability of all activities related to food production, distribution and consumption.

A co-benefit analysis will be used to ascertain which actions have the highest potential for positively affecting both nutrition and the environment. The team will also list major potential trade-offs linked with the environmental actions, to offer policymakers a comprehensive view on which recommendations are most likely to work according to the current consensus, and what negative consequences they may have. The final lists of actions, potential co-benefits, and trade-offs will be incorporated in the Food Systems Dashboard.

The project has been funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

This project is supporting UNICEF regional and country offices to put together a picture of daily life of how children interact with food environments in their countries. The focus is on capturing, illustrating and communicating how food systems influence the diets of children in the context of their lived realities, such as their assets and resources, the cultural aspects of food and social norms. The study is launching in the Philippines, and will expand to include other countries of the world. The intended outcome is that UNICEF, government and nutrition stakeholders are more informed about the role food environments play in influencing children’s diets, and more ready to implement the needed combination of actions to enable food systems to deliver better diets for children.