Comparison to the UK

Dec 6, 2022

Multi-buy promotions offered much more by Swedish supermarkets than UK supermarkets

A similar Superlist Health study was executed in the United Kingdom, which allows comparison of the results between these countries. The share of unhealthy promotions was roughly similar for both countries. However, the use of multi-buys for unhealthy promotions is much more prevalent in Sweden compared to the UK.

Swedish supermarkets made more use of multi-buy promotions for unhealthy products (82 percent) than UK supermarkets (28 percent).

Of note is that one of the four British supermarkets, Sainsbury’s, has an official policy that it refrains from multi-buy promotions for HFSS products. This results in a higher overall share of temporary price reductions and a lower overall share of multi-buy promotions for UK supermarkets. When excluding Sainsbury’s from this analysis, 60 percent of unhealthy products were promoted by multi-buys by the remaining UK supermarkets, compared to 82 percent by Swedish supermarkets.