Marketing Responses to the Taxation of Soft Drinks Comment on "Understanding Marketing Responses to a Tax on Sugary Drinks: A Qualitative Interview Study in the United Kingdom, 2019".

The paper by Forde et al provides a useful qualitative consideration of marketing responses to the implementation of the 2018 Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) in the United Kingdom. This commentary discusses that paper and its conclusions and seeks to place them in a broader context for marketing, fiscal measures and health and public policy. It suggests that modern conceptualisations of marketing and wider considerations of market and non-market strategies could provide a valuable lens to understand the ways in which companies and sectors respond to the threats they perceive and the constantly changing sectoral opportunities.

Non-market strategy as a framework for exploring commercial involvement in health policy: A primer.

This paper outlines the role of non-market strategy and its relevance to public health. Three broad categories of non-market activity are described: corporate political activity, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and legal activity, with examples relevant to public health. The importance to public health researchers of considering business activity through a non-market lens has been outlined.

Making hospital shops healthier: evaluating the implementation of a mandatory standard for limiting food products and promotions in hospital retail outlets.

Background: The range of products stocked and their promotions in food retail outlets in healthcare settings can affect food choices by staff, patients and visitors. The innovative Scottish Healthcare Retail Standard (HRS) is a national mandatory scheme requiring all hospital food retail outlets to change the balance of food products stocked and their promotion to comply with nutritional criteria and promotional restrictions. The aim is to facilitate healthier food choices in healthcare settings.

Neighbourhood food environment and area deprivation: spatial accessibility to grocery stores selling fresh fruit and vegetables in urban and rural settings.

Background: The 'deprivation amplification' hypothesis suggests that residents of deprived neighbourhoods have universally poorer access to high-quality food environments, which in turn contributes to the development of spatial inequalities in diet and diet-related chronic disease. This paper presents results from a study that quantified access to grocery stores selling fresh fruit and vegetables in four environmental settings in Scotland, UK.

Methods: Spatial accessibility, as measured by network travel times, to 457 grocery stores located in 205 neighbourhoods in four environmental settings (island, rural, small town and urban) in Scotland was calculated using Geographical Information Systems.

Variations in fresh fruit and vegetable quality by store type, urban-rural setting and neighbourhood deprivation in Scotland.

Objective: Neighbourhood differences in access to fresh fruit and vegetables may explain social inequalities in diet. Investigations have focused on variations in cost and availability as barriers to the purchase and consumption of fresh produce; investigations of quality have been neglected. Here we investigate whether produce quality systematically varies by food store type, rural-urban location and neighbourhood deprivation in a selection of communities across Scotland.

Large scale food retailing as an intervention for diet and health: quasi-experimental evaluation of a natural experiment.

Objectives: To assess the effect on fruit and vegetable consumption, self reported, and psychological health of a "natural experiment"-the introduction of large scale food retailing in a deprived Scottish community.

Design: Prospective quasi-experimental design comparing baseline and follow up data in an "intervention" community with a matched "comparison" community in Glasgow, UK.

Participants: 412 men and women aged 16 or over for whom follow up data on fruit and vegetable consumption and GHQ-12 were available.