Who is in the room when UK food policy is decided
The records of who ministers meet exist, but they sit scattered across departments and are hard to read as a whole. This tracker turns them into a single evidence base linking lobbying access to corporate positions on food-system reform.
This page is a high-level overview of an initiative in development. Findings and dataset outputs will be added as the work is delivered.
What it is
The tracker is a quarterly dataset, running from 2020 to the present, that links UK ministers' meetings and hospitality records to around 36 food companies and trade associations, and connects each engagement to those organisations' public positions on food policy. It brings records that are currently scattered across government departments into one standardised, transparent source.
Why it matters
Researchers, advocates, policymakers, and investors all need to see where corporate influence is shaping food-system reform, but the underlying records are inconsistent and hard to work with. Names appear in several forms, meetings sit in separate departmental releases, and positions are stated across scattered documents. Standardising all of it into one reliable dataset makes the pattern of access legible and gives the debate a shared evidence base.
What it produces
Each quarter the work reconciles company names and acronyms, matches every meeting to the correct company or trade association, and captures and summarises the relevant public position statements for context. The result is a clean, transparent dataset built for analysis, advocacy, and public communication, supporting Food Foundation's research and giving others a way to assess corporate influence on food policy for themselves.
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