Background: Marketing is pervasive on commercial infant and toddler food packaging, with colourful imagery, popular children’s characters, health and nutrition claims. Food marketing negatively impacts children’s dietary behaviours, influencing their preferences, choices, and consumption of unhealthy foods, and subsequent obesity risk. Research to date has focused on child-directed marketing, yet evidence suggests parents are also aggressively targeted. Understanding the ways in which parents are targeted by food marketing practices is important to ensure design and implementation of comprehensive policies that protect children from related dietary harms.
Aim: This presentation synthesises findings from two studies to describe the nature and impact of front-of-pack marketing targeted towards parents on infant and toddler foods.
Methods: Using automated data scraping we collected front-of-pack images of infant and toddler foods available in Australia’s two major supermarkets. A 36-item coding framework was applied to analyse a sample of 230 products, quantifying marketing techniques and identifying features targeting parents. We then conducted in-depth interviews with 28 Victorian parents (June-July 2023) to explore if and how front-of-pack marketing influences their perceptions and purchases of infant and toddler foods.
Results: Infant and toddler food packages are saturated with marketing with up to 15 individual marketing features on the front-of-pack. All packages included features that target parents, with health-related appeals commonly influencing choices. This included free-from claims such as ‘no added sugar’ and ‘no preservatives’; claims promoting desired ingredients such as ‘contains one serve of fruit’; and images of healthy ingredients. Parents expect information on food packages to be truthful, however they are wary of misleading and deceitful marketing tactics.
Conclusion: Front-of-pack marketing on infant and toddler foods predominantly targets parents, influencing their perceptions and purchases. Public health advocacy for food marketing regulation will need to consider parent-appeal marketing to ensure policies adequately protect children’s diets from industry influence.