As we mark Sugar Awareness Week 2025, this year, Action on Salt and Sugar are shining a spotlight on the urgent need for stronger food and nutrition policies that prioritise health and make it easier for families to choose healthier options.

At Nursery Kitchen, we fully support this call to action. We know that children’s early food experiences shape their long-term eating habits, and the food environment around them plays a huge role in that. Hidden sugars, confusing labelling, and halo marketing claims make it far too easy for children to consume more sugar than recommended often without parents or early years professionals realising.

Advocating for change: our CPPG report on early years nutrition
Earlier this year, we, alongside Action on Salt and Sugar, and other professionals contributed to the Cross-Party Parliamentary Group (CPPG) report on Early Years Nutrition – Settings the Standards for Change. The report made a series of strong recommendations to government and policymakers, including clearer food labelling, stronger regulation around marketing to children, and the extension of free school meals to early years settings, all aimed at building a food environment that truly supports children’s health.

This year’s Sugar Awareness Week perfectly reinforces that message: to improve outcomes for young children, we must access to good food easier by ensuring that transparency, not confusion, guides every label, product, and policy decision.

The reality of sugar in children’s diets
On average, children in the UK consume around three times more sugar than is recommended. The consequences of this are stark with rates of tooth decay, childhood obesity, and diet-related illness on the rise. Last financial year alone, tooth extraction under general anaesthetic in children cost the NHS £74.8 million, a shocking reminder of the impact of high-sugar diets on young lives and our health system.

According to the most recent National Diet and Nutrition Survey, most of the added sugars in children’s diets come from foods such as buns, cakes, pastries, fruit pies, sweet biscuits, breakfast cereals, sugar-sweetened drinks, smoothies, and fruit juices. These foods and drinks are often marketed directly to families with ambiguous labelling meaning families are often not aware of their hidden sugar content.

Our commitment to establishing healthy habits early
At Nursery Kitchen, we believe in setting the highest standards for children’s food. We take our role in shaping children’s health seriously and are proud to go beyond existing guidelines in many areas of nutrition but especially in reducing free sugars across all our menus.

Our approach includes:

• Never adding sugar or sugar substitutes to our recipes or meals.
• Providing second courses that contain no added or free sugars, only those naturally present in foods such as fruit and plain yoghurt.
• Using the term ‘second course’ instead of ‘pudding’ or ‘dessert’ and offering a range of savoury second course options to acknowledge that meals are not always followed by something sweet.
• Offering only low-sugar breakfast such as puffed rice, puffed oats, wheat biscuits and baked oats.

We also work closely with our nursery partners to consider how children experience, learn and talk about food. Through our training and tailored resources, we support early years practitioners to reflect on how their language, approach, and wider food environment shapes children’s attitudes towards eating, not just what children eat, but how they feel about food and mealtimes.

Shaping healthier futures together
Our commitment goes beyond the food we provide. We support the wider movement calling for clearer labelling, stronger policy, and a fairer food system that makes the healthy choice the easy choice.

This Sugar Awareness Week, we stand alongside Action on Salt and Sugar, and all those working to improve the nation’s food environment. Together, we can help ensure that every child has the best possible start in life, one that’s shaped by nourishing food, honest information, and a culture that values health above all else.