The UK government set 2020 as the year chain restaurants had to hit their sugar targets, 2024 for salt, and 2025 for calories.
A team at Oxford decided to audit the actual menus – 3,099 items across 21 of the country’s top-earning chains.
What they found suggests the deadlines didn’t mean much at all.
Voluntary targets fall short
A new study from the University of Oxford looked at the 21 highest-grossing chain restaurants in Britain.
The researchers asked: how many menu items actually meet the government’s voluntary reduction targets? The answer was just 43 percent.
The figure covers 3,099 menu items pulled directly from each chain’s own website in early 2024.
Roughly six in ten met the calorie target. Just under six in ten met the salt target. Sugar ranked the worst at 36 percent.
Alice O’Hagan, a doctoral researcher who led the work at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, said adherence varied widely between restaurants and food types.
The team pulled nutritional information directly from chain websites, working through PDF menus and online portals to log more than 3,000 individual items.
Each one was checked against the government’s target for its food type.
Three separate reduction programs governed the rules. The sugar reduction push required changes by 2020. Salt targets came due in 2024.
The calorie reduction program ran to 2025, extended from 2024 because of the pandemic.
Modeling research has long suggested these reductions could cut rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease, with one paper estimating substantial health gains if the sugar program hit its goal.
Sugar fares the worst
Of the three nutrients, sugar was where chains performed worst. Just over a third of eligible menu items came in at or below the government’s sugar limit for their category.
Several chains scored zero. Burger King, KFC, Nando’s, and Vintage Inns had not a single eligible item meeting the sugar target.
Papa John’s was the lowest adherer overall. Only 8% of its items met the salt target, and 35% met the calorie target. With every applicable bar layered together, just 8% of the menu cleared them all.
Pizza chains lag behind
Grouping the chains by cuisine type, pizza restaurants came out at the bottom.
Just 32% of pizza-restaurant menu items cleared all applicable targets, compared with 59% for burger restaurants – the highest-performing group.
Inside the food categories themselves, salads led the pack at 96% adherence, though salads were only eligible for the calorie target.
Breakfast items came second at 66%. Desserts and pizzas sat at the bottom.
A US study tracking American fast-food meals from 2008 to 2017 found a similar pattern of stalled progress, suggesting this is not just a British problem.
Same cuisine, different results
Chains selling broadly similar food performed very differently. Burger King and McDonald’s both have burger menus, but their adherence figures came in nowhere near each other.
Subway, the only sandwich chain in the top tier, had 76% of its menu items hitting all applicable targets – the highest result in the sample. Several large pizza chains, by contrast, sat in the teens.
Until this paper, no one had compared adherence across whole menus, by company, for all three reduction targets at once.
Cuisine type, the data showed, is not the constraint. It is recipe choices and portion sizes.
“Interestingly, restaurants with similar menu styles performed quite differently in meeting the targets,” said O’Hagan.
The case for mandates
The Oxford team noted that voluntary targets aren’t working.
A 2024 review of reformulation policies across multiple countries confirmed what the UK data suggests – mandatory rules consistently outperform voluntary ones in getting industry to reduce salt, sugar, and calories.
“Voluntary targets alone are not delivering consistent improvements in the salt, sugar or calorie content of food items on offer in UK restaurants,” said study co-author Lauren Bandy.
The data was collected in early 2024, before salt and calorie deadlines had fully expired, so adherence may have shifted since.
Sales figures for individual items were also unavailable, meaning a healthier-looking menu doesn’t guarantee healthier eating in practice.
If customers mostly order what misses the targets, the menu’s headline numbers tell an incomplete story.
Nutritional values also came from restaurant-reported sources, which the researchers noted can be incomplete and difficult to verify.
What could change next
The NHS 10 Year Health Plan has already proposed mandatory reporting of healthy sales from large food companies, with a path toward mandatory targets to follow.
If the rules go mandatory, chains missing them will face public reporting, industry comparisons, and enforcement pressure – not just a voluntary nudge.
Other countries show that this approach can deliver. The UK’s own salt program, launched in 2004, brought average sodium levels down roughly 2% annually through 2011.
Those results are consistent with clear, monitored targets applied consistently across the food industry.
For now, the data sends a clear message. Healthier chain menus are possible – they already exist at companies that chose to build them. They simply aren’t standard yet.
The study is published in the journal PLOS Medicine.
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