You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 71, Issue 11
  • Change in non-alcoholic beverage sales following a 10-pence levy on sugar-sweetened beverages within a national chain of restaurants in the UK: interrupted time series analysis of a natural experiment

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Research report
Change in non-alcoholic beverage sales following a 10-pence levy on sugar-sweetened beverages within a national chain of restaurants in the UK: interrupted time series analysis of a natural experiment
  1. Laura Cornelsen1,
  2. Oliver T Mytton2,
  3. Jean Adams2,
  4. Antonio Gasparrini1,
  5. Dalia Iskander1,
  6. Cecile Knai1,
  7. Mark Petticrew1,
  8. Courtney Scott1,
  9. Richard Smith1,
  10. Claire Thompson1,
  11. Martin White2,
  12. Steven Cummins1
  1. 1 Faculty of Public Health & Policy, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK
  2. 2 Centre for Diet & Activity Research & MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, Institute of Metabolic Science, Cambridge, UK
  1. Correspondence to Prof Steven Cummins, Department of Social & Environmental Health Research, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London WC1H 9SH, UK; steven.cummins{at}lshtm.ac.uk

Abstract

Background This study evaluates changes in sales of non-alcoholic beverages in Jamie’s Italian, a national chain of commercial restaurants in the UK, following the introduction of a £0.10 per-beverage levy on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and supporting activity including beverage menu redesign, new products and establishment of a children’s health fund from levy proceeds.

Methods We used an interrupted time series design to quantify changes in sales of non-alcoholic beverages 12 weeks and 6 months after implementation of the levy, using itemised electronic point of sale data. Main outcomes were number of SSBs and other non-alcoholic beverages sold per customer. Linear regression and multilevel random effects models, adjusting for seasonality and clustering, were used to investigate changes in SSB sales across all restaurants (n=37) and by tertiles of baseline restaurant SSB sales per customer.

Results Compared with the prelevy period, the number of SSBs sold per customer declined by 11.0% (−17.3% to −4.3%) at 12 weeks and 9.3% (−15.2% to −3.2%) at 6 months. For non-levied beverages, sales per customer of children’s fruit juice declined by 34.7% (−55.3% to −4.3%) at 12 weeks and 9.9% (−16.8% to −2.4%) at 6 months. At 6 months, sales per customer of fruit juice increased by 21.8% (14.0% to 30.2%) but sales of diet cola (−7.3%; −11.7% to −2.8%) and bottled waters (−6.5%; −11.0% to −1.7%) declined. Changes in sales were only observed in restaurants in the medium and high tertiles of baseline SSB sales per customer.

Conclusions Introduction of a £0.10 levy on SSBs alongside complementary activities is associated with declines in SSB sales per customer in the short and medium term, particularly in restaurants with higher baseline sales of SSBs.

  • sugar-sweetened beverages
  • diet
  • sugar tax
  • natural experiment
  • interrupted-time series

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2017-209947

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Supplementary materials

    Footnotes

    • Contributors SC conceived the study, directed analyses, interpreted results and drafted the paper. LC conducted analyses, interpreted results and drafted the paper. MW, AG, JA, OTM, RS, CT, DI, CK, MP and CS helped design the study, interpret results and commented on drafts of the paper. SC is the guarantor of the study.

    • Funding This study was funded by the UK National Institute of Health Research (PHR 15/124/01) and the UK Medical Research Council (MRC Strategic Skills Fellowship to LC). JA and MW are funded by the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR), a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence. Funding from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research and the Wellcome Trust, under the auspices of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, is gratefully acknowledged. None of the authors were involved in the design or the implementation of the levy by the restaurant chain. The evaluative study was conceived postimplementation of the levy. The authors had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. SC confirms that the manuscript is an honest, accurate and transparent account of the study being reported; no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and any discrepancies from the study as planned have been explained.

    • Disclaimer The funders of the study had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation or writing of the paper. The Jamie Oliver Foundation, Jamie’s Italian and their employees had no role in the study design, data analysis, data interpretation or writing of the paper.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Ethics approval Ethical approval was obtained from LSHTM Research Ethics Committee.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement The dataset used within this study is commercially sensitive and is owned by a third-party. The data provider (Jamie’s Italian) will accept requests to access to sales data used in the analyses presented here. These requests should be made in writing to the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation (http://www.jamieoliverfoodfoundation.org.uk).