Forty-five organisations, seventy-nine per cent of the country, one Charter.

The polling is the part that travels.

YouGov found that 79% of British adults are not confident that food companies will reduce sugar, salt, and saturated fat without government intervention. The same polling found that 79% of British adults say government should do more to make a balanced diet affordable. And 47% of British adults — almost half the country — say it is harder to eat a balanced diet now than it was twenty years ago.

The Charter codifies what those numbers say. The campaign’s headline demand: extend the Soft Drinks Industry Levy to other unhealthy foods, and reinvest the revenue in children’s health.

There is more in the Charter than that one demand, and more in the We’re Fed Up! report than the three polling figures named above. The full Charter and the full polling tables are linked in the source list at the bottom of this piece. What we are reading here is what those figures mean at the level of the country’s mood about food.

It is no longer a position. It is a fact about how the country feels.

It is not a slim majority. It is not a coalition of ideological actors. It is roughly four out of every five adults in the United Kingdom — across regions, across income brackets, across the political spectrum the YouGov methodology samples in proportion. When polling shows a figure that high, what is being measured is no longer a position on a debated question. It is a fact about how the country feels.

The fact in this case: the population does not believe the food industry will fix this on its own.

That belief is not new. Sugar Watch, Action on Salt, the Children’s Food Campaign, the Food Foundation’s prior reports — the same pattern of public opinion has been building since the 2010s, and the 1942 Beveridge Report’s framing of food as a public-health concern is older than that. What is new this April is that the figure has crossed the threshold where a 45-organisation coalition can stand behind it without qualification.

The Charter is not asking the country to believe what it already believes. The Charter is asking the country’s elected representatives to act on what the country already believes.

The 79% figure is a household figure.

Polling adults across the country measures, in the aggregate, what individual households think when they stand at the supermarket aisle and try to read a label that has been engineered to be hard to read. The structural fact under the polling is the same structural fact CheckIT exists to address: the moment of decision is the unit. The household is the unit. The shopper is the unit. The label is on the back of the pack. The decision is being made at the front.

Across the diaspora communities the Independent 500 directory anchors itself in — Caribbean, West African, South Asian, East African — the same household-level reading shows up in qualitative form. I cannot tell what this is doing to my mother’s blood sugar. I cannot read what is in the children’s drink. I do not know whether the scotch bonnet paste in the cupboard counts as the salt or whether it is the soy sauce that does. The polling is national-aggregate; the qualitative reading is community-specific. They name the same fact.

The universal framing is on the record. Food illiteracy is class-blind, language-blind, app-blind, condition-blind, age-blind. The structural critique is: the country is not failing to read the labels. The labels are formulated and presented in a way that is hard to read. The 79% figure is what happens when that structural fact crosses the public-opinion threshold and becomes a Charter.

The disproportionate framing is also on the record. Food illiteracy lands hardest on the households carrying the highest chronic-illness risk gradients — diabetes, hypertension, oral health — and the diaspora communities the Independent 500 directory exists to serve are the households where those risk gradients run highest. The Charter’s demand for SDIL extension and the reinvestment of revenue in children’s health is not framed in diaspora-specific language; the polling is national. But the universal framing of the demand is what makes it operative across exactly the households that carry the highest cost.

The campaign window between now and autumn 2026.

The Charter is a document. The headline demands include:

• Extend the Soft Drinks Industry Levy to additional categories of unhealthy food.
• Reinvest the revenue raised in children’s health programmes.
• Strengthen the regulatory framework for advertising less-healthy food to children.
• Commit government to a measurable national programme on food affordability and access.

The full demand register is in the We’re Fed Up! report. Sustain leads the publication; the Food Foundation and the Obesity Health Alliance are joint leads on the campaign vehicle; forty-two further organisations are coalition signatories. The Charter will be handed to MPs in Westminster in autumn 2026. Until that handover, the campaign collects signatures and surfaces the polling.

The window between now and autumn 2026 is roughly four to five months. In that window the Soft Drinks Industry Levy strengthening (announced in the November 2025 budget, in force from 1 January 2028) sits in a parallel timeline. The two timelines are connected: the Charter’s lead demand is to extend the Levy that is being strengthened on the parallel track. The Levy strengthening is procedural; the Charter’s extension demand is political.

We document the moment. We do not co-opt it.

This piece is anthropological. SCANSMART documents the moment; we do not co-opt it.

What we can say cleanly: the polling validates the structural argument that SCANSMART’s public-facing voice has carried since the brand was scoped. The argument is that the food economy operates with a structural gap between what is in the product and what is read at the moment of decision; that the gap is engineered upstream, not by retailers or shopkeepers; and that consumers asked to navigate the gap are doing the rational thing when they ask for help. The 79% finding is what that argument looks like when it is measured.

What we will not say is that SCANSMART is the answer to the Charter’s demands. We are not the answer. The Charter’s demands are policy demands; the answer is legislative and regulatory action. What SCANSMART does is operate at a different unit — the household, the moment of decision, the back-of-pack data translated into units a person making a decision can read fast — and that work is not a substitute for the policy work the Charter is asking for. It is a complement at a different scale.

The Independent 500 directory exists for the same reason the Charter exists. Both are responses to the same structural fact. Both run on different timelines, at different scales, and through different mechanisms. The Charter goes to Westminster in autumn 2026. The directory grows with each shop visit and each verified product. They sit alongside each other in the same architecture of response.

Where the figures come from.

1. Sustain — We’re Fed Up! report (23 April 2026): sustainweb.org/reports/apr26-we-are-fed-up
2. YouGov — Recipe for Change polling fieldwork April 2026 (commissioned by Sustain, available via the We’re Fed Up! report)
3. The Grocer — Citizens want a healthy food environment, industry should get on board (23 April 2026)
4. Talking Retail — Public support for Government to hold ‘big food’ accountable (22 April 2026)
5. Recipe for Change campaign — recipeforchange.org.uk (Charter document, signatures, autumn 2026 Westminster handover details)
6. Coalition signatories — full list of 45 organisations available via the We’re Fed Up! report appendix
7. Soft Drinks Industry Levy strengthening — GOV.UK consultation outcome (November 2025); in force 1 January 2028

Anthropological documentation, not advocacy.

This piece reads a moment in the country’s public conversation about food and translates it into Library voice. It does not advocate for the Charter’s policy demands; it documents that the demands have been published and that public-opinion data supports them. It does not give clinical or medical advice. It does not name individual food-industry actors. It does not replace the conversation any reader might want to have with their GP or a registered dietitian about specific dietary thresholds for their condition.

What this piece does do: place the 79% finding on the public record at scansmart.uk; document the coalition that brought the Charter forward; name the autumn 2026 handover to Westminster as the moment to watch; tie the moment to the universal framing that has been on the SCANSMART record since the brand was scoped.

Where to go next.

The peer-reviewed evidence base under the structural argument the Charter codifies is in Industry Funding Bias in Nutrition Research. The first regulator-led enforcement under the new less-healthy-food advertising rules — published a week before the Charter launched — is read in The first HFSS bans landed. The full Knowledge Library carries five streams.

Knowledge Library · Civic-society anthropology entry · 14 May 2026 · SCANSMART Ltd, Co. No. 17128797, England & Wales · Not medical advice. The decision is yours.

Where this anthropology entry connects.

For deeper evidence-vault treatment connecting this entry to the SCANSMART analytical framework, see: Impulse Buying Triggers · Food Marketing to Kids · Brand vs Manufacturer · Reformulation Tracking · Cultural Food Myths · Global Staple Foods · Dietary Patterns · Carbohydrate Types · Caffeine and Health · Industry Funding Bias in Nutrition Research · UPF Brain & Cognitive Claims · Children’s Oral Health · Behaviour Change & Decision-Point Capture.

Reference-format consistency pass · 11 May 2026 · Stale-date reminder: re-check after autumn 2026 Westminster handover of the Recipe for Change Citizens' Charter and any related parliamentary engagement updates · SCANSMART is a food literacy and decision-support platform. It is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice. The decision is yours.