Sugar Tax

It’s no surprise that in the UK, organisations and governing bodies are stepping up their pursuit in tackling the UK’s love affair with sugary food and drinks. Sugar taxing is one of eight recommendations made by Public Health England designed to tackle the UK’s growing problem with its sugar obsession as a high intake of our favourite sugary items is linked to obesity, diabetes and even liver disease. Bigger questions will be, how this potential proposal will impact on companies involved including the manufacturers as their own profit from sales may take a hit from these potential new proposals.

The idea of sugar taxing is to initially add up to 20% tax on all sugar ridden items including fizzy drinks, sweets and a host more. For example, adding 20% tax on a Mars bar which costs around £0.60p would cost £0.72 and if you looked at a 1.74 litre Coca-Cola bottle cost £1.85 now add the tax percentage and that would bring it up to £2.22. Although as you can see the tax won’t bring up the prices marginally, it will still make you think twice about paying the added price as this plan is meant to drive you away from buying these items.

Via The Independent, it’s claimed that a spokesman for Mr David Cameron said on Thursday: “The Prime Minister thinks there are more effective ways of tackling this issue than putting a tax on sugar.” Personally, I would agree with Mr Cameron as I believe there are many other alternatives than adding more tax onto something people clearly enjoy as putting tax on more items may cause an uproar with the population like we saw with the added tax on carrier bags.

So now with the potential implementations, we may see an effect on marketing plans, manufacturing and also labelling. As these changes will also bring changes to packaging details, here at Advanced Labelling Systems we do specialise in label applications which can help with any future labelling obstacle which these changes may cause through our contract labelling service.