Background: Healthy eating during infancy and early childhood is essential for healthy growth and development and reducing long-term chronic disease risk. Many parents and carers rely on commercially produced ready-made, infant and toddler foods.
Methods: This presentation provides an overview of industry strategies used to market infant and toddler foods and examines recent research assessing consumer’s responses to such marketing.
Results: Australian parents are exposed to prolific marketing for infant and toddler food products across a range of media and settings. Many of these products are nutritionally suboptimal, yet marketed and labelled in ways that can confer a ‘healthy halo’ over products and mislead parents about their true contents. Such marketing can influence parents’ and carers’ product preferences, purchases and ultimately what they feed their infants and toddlers.
Conclusion: There is a need to reconfigure the marketing and labelling of food and drink products to empower parents and carers to identify and select healthier options for their infants and toddlers.