Responsible promotion

Food promotion influences consumer choices and could be more geared towards healthy diets from sustainable sources.

In the Netherlands alone, the food industry spends nearly €1.600 million on marketing every year. More than three-quarters of that marketing budgets go to unhealthy and unsustainable products. With this program we contribute to a transformation of marketing practices leading to responsible marketing of food.

Government policies uptil today are mostly aimed at stimulating healthy and sustainable behavior. Very little attention or support is given to policies that discourage unhealthy and unsustainable behavior. However, the major omission are policies that prohibit encouraging unhealthy and unsustainable behavior. Meaning stimulating practices such as advertising, low prices and just any type of activity that promotes unhealthy and unsustainable behavior. 

Questionmark's program 'Responsible promotion' focusses food promotion in relation to overconsumption.

In our program we put a special focus on on retailers and multi-buy promotions. These are promotions such as ‘Three for the price of one’ and ‘Buy one get one free’. These type of promotions encourage customers to buy and eat more food than they planned to. Moreover, this overconsumption drives food waste, and a host of other societal issues, including preventable disease, deforestation and climate change. In this program we use the momentum created by British legislation, coming into force in October 2025. We begin with setting up our program in the Netherlands.