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This article explores how large international companies in the breakfast cereal, snack, and beverage industries address the issue of obesity, and how their strategies are governed by various forms of self‐regulation. In a first step, we study websites of ten companies and identify five different dimensions: (i) mission statements, (ii) educational commitment statements, (iii) nutrition labeling, (iv) marketing code of conduct, and (v) education initiatives aimed at professionals. Based on a coding of these activities, we conducted hierarchical cluster analysis and selected five case companies for in‐depth investigation. This analysis reveals different types of self‐regulation strategies, reflecting differences in levels of commitment and instrumentation. Some companies pursue defensive strategies, some with an element of "blame‐control," whereas others adopt offensive strategies to promote their products. Differences in market communication strategies can be attributed to variations in product portfolio and market orientation, and can also be seen as attempts to forestall public regulation.

AbstractThe potential role of food retailing as a determinant for the growth in obesity prevalence has been the subject of a number of studies in the literature. This paper develops and demonstrates a corporate social responsibility evaluation tool—calorie efficiency—to benchmark a specific retail chain's corporate sustainability performance in promoting healthier food choice at the consumers, based on household panel shopping data for five food categories. The studied retail chain has performed slightly better than its closest competitors for four of the five product categories, when adjusted for changes in the retailers' customer population. The results demonstrate the importance of adjusting for changes in customer population when undertaking such benchmarking—especially when the food retail sector undergoes substantial structural developments. The developed framework can rather straightforwardly be transferred to other domains, such as business activities' impacts on climate change or the environment.

Canteen Takeaway is a novel concept, which entails workplace canteens to utilise existing production capacity to supply packaged meals for employees to bring home. The concept has a potential to raise the average nutritional quality of employees' diets. The purpose of the study is to assess the economic net gains for users, and for society as a whole, of promoting healthy canteen takeaway meals, using Danish workplaces as an example. The analytical framework for the study combines direct cost analyses, users' willingness to pay estimated through a choice experiment and cost-of-illness methods to assess the net society costs and benefits associated with an extended use of canteen takeaway meals as a health promotion strategy. The results show that employees have a positive willingness to pay for health attributes in canteen takeaway meals, but with a minority having a highly negative willingness to pay for the canteen takeaway concept. The potential health effects of a healthy canteen takeaway programme are estimated to be positive, but modest in magnitude. The estimated costs of providing healthy canteen takeaway meals exceed the sum of average direct and indirect benefits. In conclusion, healthy CTA programmes seems to be an economically sustainable intervention at some workplaces, though the analysis does not fully support a full-scale implementation of healthy CTA programmes at Danish workplaces from a welfare economic perspective.