Agency salt partners take their wares to market

Friday 20 June 2008

Eighty stakeholders, including nutritionists, dietitians and delegates from industry and academia, attended an FSA event held last week to disseminate best practice arising from salt-reduction initiatives. These were organised as part of phase three of the Agency’s salt programme.

Summaries of the lessons learned from eight projects, held in different parts of the UK, are published for the first time today and can be found at the links below.

The dissemination event, held in London, was co-hosted with the Interim Professional Body for Nutrition.
The eight projects, run by FSA salt partners, included initiatives targeted at peer educators and young parents, projects working with cooks in Hindu and Sikh temples and schemes with housing association staff and residents.

The salt partners involved in running the initiatives were the Bristol Primary Care Trust, British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK, the Food Commission, Haringey Teaching Primary Care Trust, Kent County Council Trading Standards, Manchester Food Futures Partnership and the National Children’s Bureau.

Speakers at the dissemination event highlighted the benefits of partnership working and participants were given the opportunity to network with each other in a 'market place' with displays of the projects.

Maureen Strong, Nutrition Manager at AHDB Meat Services, described some of the interventions highlighted as ‘practical, realistic and easy to do’.

She said: ‘It's been great to hear about these local targeted projects, which have been running in parallel with industry-wide activity to reduce the salt in the food chain. I think we can all learn a lot from them.’

Hanneke Veldhuis, Business Manager Maxarite, DSM Food Specialities, who came from Rotterdam to attend the event, said it was ‘extremely interesting to see how a big organisation like the FSA [is] able to engage action in local organisations to bring it into practice. It’s especially interesting to see from an international perspective different ways of working.'

Nicole Patterson, from Leatherhead Foods, added that the event offered an ‘insightful introduction to the combined efforts people are making’.

More on the projects can be found at the links below.