Are Voluntary Pledges Enough to Get Major Food Companies to Reduce Sodium?

​Joshua Petimar, ScD

Americans eat way too much salt. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 90% of Americans consume more sodium than the recommended 2,300mg per day. This is a huge public health problem because excess sodium leads to high blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. While many of us know to limit the amount of salt we sprinkle on our food, this will do little to address the problem because 70% of the sodium in our diet comes from packaged and restaurant foods. If we want to reduce sodium consumption, we should focus less on how we prepare food for ourselves at home and worry more about what companies put in our food. But how do we get them to change?

One strategy is to set voluntary sodium reduction targets for the food industry and advocate for companies to commit to meeting those targets. That’s the objective of the National Salt Reduction Initiative (NSRI), which is a coalition of over 100 health organizations, led by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The NSRI launched in 2009 with the goal of getting companies to make a 10% reduction in the sodium content of their products by 2012 and a 25% reduction by 2014. Through this initiative, several large manufacturers like Heinz, Kraft Foods, and Goya Foods pledged to lower sodium in their foods. However, given that this voluntary pledge is not legally enforceable, is this enough to make a meaningful change in packaged foods’ sodium content?
 
Yes and no, according to new research from Moran and colleagues in the American Journal of Public Health. Between 2009 and 2018, the research team found an 8.5% reduction in the sodium content of top-selling packaged foods.  Most of the change occurred shortly after the NSRI was first launched, but progress slowed and eventually plateaued after 2012. By the end of the study, only 20% of products met the 2014 sodium reduction target. While this was a notable improvement from before the NSRI, it shows that there is still a long way to go to improve our food’s sodium content.

What explains the waning effect of the NSRI over time? The authors point out that when the NSRI first launched, it received a lot of media attention. This was partially due to the fact that the NRSI launched around the same time that both federal sodium target recommendations were released and mandated changes to the school lunch program went into effect. These developments may have encouraged manufacturers to reformulate their products if they perceived stricter surveillance of their products’ sodium content. However, momentum for sodium policies slowed after 2016, which may have reduced the food industry’s incentive for further reformulation.
 
What more can be done to reduce sodium in the nation’s food supply? While some countries like Argentina and South Africa have opted for mandatory sodium targets in some food categories, that approach would be harder to implement in the U.S. given the current political climate. In the absence of legislation for sodium limits, voluntary targets, such as those announced by the FDA in 2021, can lead to improvements. However, Moran and colleagues emphasize that in order for these to be successful, they must be accompanied by pressure from the government as well as rigorous monitoring of the food industry to determine whether they are meeting these targets.