True cost of UK food system nearly £300 billion

The economic cost of the UK's unhealthy food system has risen to £298 billion a year, up from £268 billion just two years ago, according to updated analysis from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission.

The analysis, by Professor Tim Jackson, FFCC Commissioner, updates his 2024 report The False Economy of Big Food and finds the gap between the cost of diet-related ill health and the cost of fixing it has widened further. The new report is being published ahead of Labour Party Conference and the launch of a new report by the Right To Food UK Commission, led by Liverpool West Derby MP, Ian Byrne.

Direct costs to the NHS, social care and the welfare system, paid by the Treasury, the taxpayer and private citizens, now stand at £104 billion a year, up from £92 billion in 2024. Averaged across every household in the UK, that works out at roughly £3,590 a year, or £69 a week, nearly matching the £78 a week the average household already spends on food. Add the £194 billion lost each year to reduced productivity and diminished quality of life, and the total cost of Britain's unhealthy food system comes to £298 billion a year, equivalent to £198 a week for every household in the country, almost three times what the average family spends on food. Only part of that (the £104 billion in direct costs) is what shows up in Treasury and household budgets; the rest reflects the wider toll of ill health on the economy and on people's lives.

By contrast, the additional annual spending needed to bring the nation's food budgets up to the government's own Eatwell Guide standard has fallen slightly, from £57 billion to £51 billion, not because diets have improved, but because overall household food spending has risen faster than the cost of eating healthily.

The hidden cost of unhealthy diets is now almost six times the size of the spending gap needed to fix it. Direct costs alone, at £104 billion, are more than twice the £51 billion uplift required.

The findings in this report underline the importance of clear policy principles including:

• treat food and health policy as economic policy
• establish affordable healthy food as a practical right
• reshape the food environment with enforceable standards and product transparency
• redirect financial flows to align commercial returns with public value
• build a cross-government food and health mission.

Professor Tim Jackson, Economist and the Director of CUSP, the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, University of Surrey, said: 

"Two years after our first report on The False Economy of Big Food, we’re now spending even more of taxpayers’ money treating food-related chronic illness, and we’re still supporting a food economy that makes healthy eating difficult or impossible - especially for poorer households. Access to decent nutrition isn’t just an ethical and public-health imperative, it’s an economic no-brainer.” 

Sue Pritchard, Chief Executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission said: 

“Our work with citizens around the UK is unequivocal. Making sure that everyone, in every postcode, has enough healthy food, sustainably produced, is both a public health imperative and an economic necessity for a more prosperous and resilient future.”