Food advertising is changing channels, not cutting calories.
New food ad rules have changed what brands can serve up.
The obvious assumption was that tighter restrictions would mean less advertising. Instead, brands have mostly kept spending — they’ve just found different places to spend it.
UK advertising spend crossed £50 billion for the first time in 2026, growing 7.5% year on year. Rather than pulling back, brands have increasingly redirected investment into channels that remain available to them, including retail media, digital out-of-home, audio and brand-led activity.
So while the media menu has got smaller in some places, the appetite to advertise clearly hasn’t.
What's been taken off the menu?
The new restrictions are designed to limit advertising for less healthy food and drink products, particularly in places where children are more likely to see it. That has put pressure on two of the biggest parts of the traditional media mix.
Paid online display and video are heavily restricted for identifiable LHF products, while pre-9pm television has become much harder territory for affected brands.
On paper, that sounds like a fairly brutal reduction in opportunity. In practice, it has become a reallocation exercise, with spend moving towards channels that still offer reach, visibility and fewer restrictions.
Every little helps. Especially Tesco's ad revenue.
One of the clearest winners is retail media. Supermarket-owned platforms such as Tesco Media and Nectar360 allow brands to reach shoppers much closer to the moment of purchase, and investment in those channels is growing quickly.
It makes sense. If it becomes harder to reach someone while they’re scrolling through their phone at home, reaching them while they’re actively deciding what to put in their basket starts to look considerably more attractive.
The supermarket is no longer just where the sale happens. It’s becoming an increasingly important part of the media plan.
Outdoor just got a bigger slice of the budget.
Digital out-of-home is another obvious beneficiary. It remains an important visual channel for building awareness across roadside, retail and transport environments, particularly as brands look for alternatives to restricted digital placements.
For FMCG brands especially, that matters. These are products built on familiarity, visibility and mental availability, so if you remove one of the easiest ways to put the pack in front of people, brands need another way to stay noticed.
Right now, a lot of that job is falling to outdoor.
Radio and cinema are back on the shopping list.
Radio, audio and cinema are also seeing steady growth as brands search for channels that can still deliver frequency and reach.
None of these channels are new, of course. What has changed is their relative importance. A media plan that might previously have defaulted to TV plus paid social now has to work a little harder and spread investment across a broader mix of channels.
Depending on your point of view, that is either an inconvenience or a useful reminder that media planning should never have been on autopilot in the first place.
No product? No problem. Unless that's all you've got.
The most interesting part of all this is what it does to the work. If brands can’t always show the product, then the brand itself has to become much more recognisable.
Colour, tone of voice, sonic cues, characters, shapes, humour and other distinctive assets all have to do more of the heavy lifting. Brand-building stops being something that can feel slightly abstract and becomes something very practical.
When product visibility is restricted, recognisability becomes a media asset.
The pack's gone missing. Can anyone still recognise you?
One of the key pressure valves in the current system is the ability for brands to communicate at a broader brand level without directly advertising a restricted product.
That gives marketers some room to maintain awareness and salience, but it also creates an interesting creative challenge: how recognisable can you be without tipping over into advertising the product itself?
That balance is already becoming an important part of the regulatory conversation.
For brands with strong distinctive assets, that is a much easier problem to solve. For everyone else, it may expose just how much of their recognition was being carried by the pack.
Same budgets. Different baskets.
The new rules haven’t made food advertising disappear. They’ve changed where it happens, how budgets are distributed and what good brand-building needs to look like.
The winners won’t necessarily be the brands that find the cleverest workaround. They’ll be the ones that build a media mix capable of adapting and a brand strong enough to remain recognisable even when the product itself has to take a back seat.
The rules have changed, but the money hasn’t gone away. It’s just looking for somewhere new to work.
Let’s do something Cheeky together
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