Veg Power, the not-for-profit alliance increasing the UK’s vegetable consumption, announced it has launched a new ‘Families and Food’ initiative to bring families together over food. The initiative, supported by a collaborative multi-disciplinary and cross-sector taskforce, aims to help the 44% of parents who want help to get their family eating together more frequently.1
There are numerous benefits of eating together as a family including improved nutrition, healthier eating habits and a positive impact on family relationships and dynamics.2 Children’s education also benefits with increased literacy and performance at school.,3,4 And interestingly, while the appetite for families to eat together is high, in reality there is a wide gap between desired and actual behaviour with 1 in 4 UK households never sharing an evening meal or doing so just once a week.5 ‘Families and Food’ seeks to tackle a range of factors connected to family mealtimes including shopping, cooking and eating together. Currently 25% of families rarely or never scratch cook at home and less than half of families get their children involved in cooking.6
Veg Power is known for its creative initiatives that engage, inspire and motivate people to improve their diets and establish life-long good food habits. To assist them with this new initiative, the not-for-profit has once again utilised its supporter network to convene a collaborative multi-disciplinary and cross-sector taskforce. While the taskforce brings together different perspectives, it shares the same goal and includes psychology and behaviour change academics, nutrition experts, retailers – Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD), chefs, influencers, government departments including DEFRA and OHID and the parenting resource Netmums. The taskforce has already contributed their knowledge and expertise and will continue to support Veg Power to fully understand the topic of family mealtimes to enable the most effective solutions to be developed.
As part of the initiative, Veg Power’s annual survey of 3,000 parents and primary school aged children will further explore the habits and barriers of family mealtimes. The results will be launched at the ‘Veg Power Summit’ in September 2025, an annual event fostering understanding and collaboration to tackle major challenges in children’s dietary health by bringing together 100 senior leaders from across the food system.
Commenting on the ‘Families and Food’ initiative, Dan Parker, chief executive, Veg Power said: “Our research suggests that families coming together over food may be the single biggest positive influence on children’s diets – combine that with the fact that families would like to be eating together more – and we identified the need to turn our attention to this topic. We want to fully understand the human dynamics of families and their food from shopping to cooking to eating so that we can determine how best to support them, utilising all of our experience from our previous campaigns. Together with our talented taskforce who have agreed to get on board with this initiative and help shape its development.”
Sue Couter, Campaigns, Healthy and Sustainable Diets, Tesco, said, “Veg Power’s initiative and research further reinforces the real benefits of a positive supportive eating environment at home, whatever that looks like. Making mealtimes enjoyable is one of the best ways we can help reinforce long-term healthy eating habits. We know it’s not always easy with busy family lives, but getting together to eat and socialise can really help.”
Nilani Sritharan, Group Head of Healthy & Sustainable Diets at Sainsbury’s, said, “Providing good food and encouraging our customers to eat healthier, more sustainable diets is a key priority for us. Working with Veg Power, we want to support families to experience the joy in mealtimes, sharing our experience of making delicious, healthy plant-rich food accessible for all. The diversity and insights from this group, in particular the way people shop, will be a powerful tool in helping us change diets for the better.”
Ali Morpeth, Registered Nutritionist and Co Founder of Planeatry Alliance said, “Food is one of the most powerful connectors we have – it brings together families, communities and culture. Supporting families to eat together more often is a simple but transformative step towards a healthier future for all of us. When children are involved in choosing, preparing, and sharing healthy meals, it sets up lifelong habits that support the health of people and the connection to the food system which nurtures us.”
