Success for our inaugural children’s food conference
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The Children’s Food Trust and School Food Trust’s 
Children’s Food Conference
Wednesday 7 March 2012
CBI Conference Centre, London, WC1A 1DU
Our very first Children’s Food Conference, held on 7th March at the CBI Conference Centre in London, was a huge success.
We brought together key thinkers, practitioners and business to talk about how better food for children can improve public health in the UK – and what more needs to be done to achieve that impact.
There were so many fantastic ideas and presentations that it’s impossible to summarise them all, but you can download slides from the speakers here:
www.schoolfoodtrust.org.uk/childrensfoodconference/presentations
You can also read live Twitter updates from the conference room here, selecting the ‘All Tweets’ option. The conference was Wednesday 7 March 2012 so scroll down until you find tweets from that date.
http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23childrensfood
One of the biggest themes of the day was the untapped potential of food to improve outcomes for children. As Sir Michael Marmot – author of ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’ and our headline speaker – said in his presentation: “Doesn’t it make you weep, that better nutrition in children’s early years would change their aspirations?….f we know that all children could benefit from better nutrition, we don’t do it for economic reasons; we do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
As part of the conference, we conducted some polling with parents to get their views on what makes it more difficult to feed children well. We also asked delegates at the conference for their views on topics covered by our speakers, using live voting technology:
- 95% of people at the conference said that there should be stronger minimum requirements for children’s food for all organisations in loco parentis.
- 60% said there isn’t enough training on food and nutrition for health visitors; 74% not enough for doctors; 68% not enough for social workers.
- 69% said they thought only very few parents understand what ‘good nutrition’ in early years represents
- 72% said they thought labelling for children’s food and children’s portions wasn’t clear enough
- 90% said they thought there is still too much advertising of foods high in fat, sugar and salt
We’re now looking forward to our next Children’s Food Conference in 2012. If you’d like to be part of it, get in touch.
As Dr Geof Rayner concluded: “
Our thanks to our conference sponsors, Cool Milk, and to Danone Dairies UK for sponsorship of the behaviour change workshop.
Conference Agenda and Speaker Biographies
Agenda:
Children’s Food Conference 2012 Agenda
Click here to download (Adobe pdf doc 478KB)
Speaker biographies:
Children’s Food Conference 2012 Agenda
Click here to download (Adobe pdf doc 938KB)
