Scotland's Junk Food Rules Go Online

Scotland's new restrictions on promoting food high in fat, sugar or salt came into force on 1 October 2026, and they do not stop at the supermarket door. The Food (Promotion and Placement) (Scotland) Regulations 2025 treat a website homepage like a shop entrance and a checkout page like a till, and they ban multibuy deals on the affected products whether the sale happens in store or online. For any larger retailer that sells pre-packed food to customers in Scotland, including gift sites and marketplace sellers, this is now a web design and merchandising job as much as a legal one.

What Are the New Rules in Scotland's Supermarkets and Online Shops?

The BBC's explainer on the change, published on 1 October 2026, describes the visible part: sugary soft drinks, biscuits and some breakfast cereals disappearing from end-of-aisle displays, entrances, checkouts and queueing areas in Scotland's larger shops. The same piece notes that the list of affected products is wider than most people expect. Alongside chocolate, crisps, biscuits and ice cream, it can take in kombucha, seaweed snacks, muesli and chewing gum, depending on what is in them.

The Scottish Government's guidance explains the test. A product has to fall into one of the categories listed in the regulations and also be classed as high in fat, sugar or salt under the UK Nutrient Profiling Model, where foods scoring 4 or more and drinks scoring 1 or more count as "less healthy". The stated aim is to make healthier choices easier. Public Health Minister Maree Todd told the BBC that promotions and prominent placement "can encourage over-consumption and impulse buying".

Scotland is the last part of Great Britain to bring these rules in. The BBC reports that England banned price and multibuy promotions on unhealthy food and drink in October 2025, and that Wales followed in March 2026. If you already sell across the UK, much of the work will be familiar, but the Scottish guidance itself warns that there are differences businesses "will wish to note", including on-pack promotions, aisle ends and enforcement.

Does This Apply to My Online Store?

The threshold is size, not sector. A business qualifies if it has 50 or more employees on the first day of the financial year in which the offer was made, and the guidance is explicit that the number "is not restricted to Scotland". A retailer based in Birmingham with 60 staff and a website that delivers to Glasgow is a qualifying business. Franchises are counted as part of the franchisor, so a small franchised outlet does not escape because its own headcount is low.

The list of examples in the guidance goes well beyond grocers. It names online food retailers and "online retailers who sell any pre-packed food – for example, gifting websites", along with department stores, clothing stores, pharmacies, garden centres and gift shops at visitor attractions. If a hamper, a box of chocolates or a bag of sweets sits in your catalogue as an add-on, the rules can reach you.

Two groups get partial relief. Specialist retailers that only or mainly sell one category, such as an online chocolatier or a cake shop, are exempt from the placement restrictions, although the guidance says they are still subject to the ban on volume price promotions. Restaurants, cafes and takeaways are out of scope of most of the requirements. Businesses under 50 employees are not covered at all, though anyone planning to grow past that line should build the logic in now rather than retrofit it.

Which Promotions Are Banned Online?

The regulations prohibit what they call volume price promotions on affected products "anywhere on an online marketplace" of a qualifying business. The guidance defines two types. The first is the multibuy: any express financial incentive for buying several items rather than one, with "3 for the price of 2", "3 for £10" and "buy 6 and save 25%" given as examples. The second is anything that indicates an item, or part of one, is free, such as "buy one get one free" or "50% extra free".

Loyalty mechanics are caught as well. The guidance gives the example of "buy 3 of these products now and get 1,000 more loyalty points" and says it is in scope because the points act as a financial incentive to buy more. That matters if your loyalty programme runs bonus-point campaigns by product, because a rule written for the whole catalogue may now need an exclusion list.

The distinction to hold on to is volume against price. A straightforward reduction on a single item is not a volume price promotion, which is why half-price and "save £1" offers survive. The guidance also notes that a multipack sold as a single item is not necessarily the same as a multibuy. For stores that lean on bundles and multi-buy pricing to raise order values, the practical question is which products in each bundle are in scope, and whether the offer rewards buying more of them.

Where Can Restricted Products No Longer Appear on a Website?

This is the part that lands on designers and developers. The guidance sets out six online "locations" where a qualifying business must not offer affected food for sale:

1. The homepage, whether or not the shopper arrives through it. A product image with an "add to basket" button is not permitted there. A banner that links through to a category or offers page may be, subject to the separate UK advertising rules.
2. While a shopper is searching for or browsing other products. A restricted product should not be surfaced against an unrelated search, with exceptions where its name or a listed ingredient matches the search term, or where it is part of a relevant special offer such as a "dine in for 2" deal.
3. While a shopper is browsing a different restricted category. Crisps should not be pushed on the biscuits page.
4. Pages the shopper did not open intentionally, such as pop-ups and "brand bursts". The guidance says this holds even when the pop-up promotes the same category the shopper is already browsing.
5. A "favourite products" page, unless the shopper has bought the item before or deliberately marked it as a favourite. Even then it must not be given more prominence than other products, and flavour variants or different pack sizes cannot be suggested alongside it.
6. Checkout pages, meaning every page in the checkout flow, including the basket and any payment, collection or delivery pages.

The checkout rule is blunt. The guidance says there must be no promotion of a restricted product as the customer proceeds to payment, "even if the customer purchased this item on their last shop or it is a favourite item". The "you forgot these" carousel and the last-minute add-on are precisely the patterns most stores spent years tuning, so checkout optimisation work now has to respect a list of products that cannot appear there.

What About Marketplaces, Apps and Delivery Platforms?

Selling through someone else's site does not move the responsibility. The guidance says that qualifying businesses offering affected food on a third-party website or platform "will have to comply with location and volume price promotions restrictions in respect of the products they are selling", and that retailers are "in scope and liable to enforcement action". It names checkout pages and pop-ups on a retailer's section of an aggregator app as places that may be caught.

Retailers are also told they are responsible for making sure contracts with delivery platforms "make clear that the law must be followed". In practice that means asking your platform account manager how sponsored placements, recommendation slots and basket prompts are filtered for Scottish orders, and getting the answer in writing. Enforcement officers, the guidance adds, will look at the facts of each case when deciding whether a platform's actions contributed to a breach.

A Website Compliance Checklist for Retailers

None of this requires a rebuild, but it does require knowing which products are affected and where your templates place them. As practical guidance:

1. Confirm whether you qualify: total employees on the first day of your financial year, including staff outside Scotland and any franchise structure.
2. Flag affected products in your catalogue data. Add an attribute for products that are both in a listed category and "less healthy" under the Nutrient Profiling Model, so every other rule can key off one field.
3. Audit homepage modules. Remove direct add-to-basket placements of flagged products and replace them with links to category pages.
4. Review recommendation and search logic, including "frequently bought together", sponsored slots and autosuggest, so flagged products are filtered where the guidance requires.
5. Strip flagged products from basket, checkout and post-add pop-up modules.
6. Check your favourites or "buy again" page so that only items the customer has actually bought or chosen appear, with no extra prominence.
7. Switch off multibuy, "extra free" and bonus-point rules for flagged products, and check that on-pack multibuy flashes are clearly marked as not available, which the guidance requires in Scotland.
8. Decide how you apply the rules geographically. Many retailers will find one UK-wide rule set simpler than branching by delivery postcode, but that is a commercial choice to take with legal advice.
9. Write to marketplace and delivery partners about how their placements are handled.
10. Keep a record of what you changed and when. Local authorities enforce the rules, and the guidance encourages businesses to talk to them about scope.

Treat the product flag as the foundation. Once it exists, the rest is template logic, and it can be tested like any other change to a product page or basket.

What Does Not Change

It is easy to over-correct. Affected products can still be sold, listed in their own category, found by a shopper who searches for them and discounted with a plain price cut. The BBC notes that meal deals remain exempt from the promotion rules, although the products in them still cannot sit in restricted locations. Specialist single-category shops keep their freedom on placement.

What changes is the toolkit. Tactics drawn from pricing psychology, such as anchoring against a reference price, still work within the rules, while volume-led mechanics on these products do not. The Scottish rules also sit alongside the UK-wide restrictions on advertising less healthy food, which the BBC reports were introduced in January 2026 and which are handled by the Advertising Standards Authority. As with green claims, the safest position is to treat on-site merchandising and paid advertising as two separate checks.

How Are the Rules Enforced?

Local authorities enforce the regulations as food authorities. The guidance states that non-compliance is an offence with a maximum criminal penalty of a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale, currently £2,500. Officers can issue compliance notices instead of prosecuting, and the guidance says prosecution may be more appropriate for repeat offenders or large-scale non-compliance. Fixed penalty notices are expected to become available at a later date but are not yet in place for these rules.

The fine is modest by the standards of consumer law. The larger cost for most retailers is likely to be the engineering time, the lost promotional slots and the reputational risk of being the named example, which is a reason to fix the templates once and properly.

Frequently Asked Questions About Scotland's Food Promotion Rules

When Did Scotland's Junk Food Promotion Rules Start?

The Food (Promotion and Placement) (Scotland) Regulations 2025 came into force on 1 October 2026, according to the Scottish Government's implementation guidance. Similar restrictions were already in place in England and Wales.

Do the Rules Apply to Small Online Shops?

No. The regulations apply to qualifying businesses with 50 or more employees. The count covers the whole business rather than only staff in Scotland, and franchise outlets are treated as part of the franchisor.

Can I Still Discount Chocolate or Crisps Online?

A simple price reduction on a single item is not a volume price promotion, and the BBC reports that half-price and "save £1" discounts are not restricted. Multibuys, "buy one get one free" offers and bonus loyalty points for buying more are banned on affected products.

Can Restricted Products Appear on My Homepage?

Not as something a shopper can add to their basket from the homepage. The guidance says an image that signposts to a category or offers page may be permitted, subject to the UK online advertising rules.

This article is general information rather than legal advice. If you sell food online to customers in Scotland, read the Scottish Government's implementation guidance and speak to your local authority or a legal adviser about your own position.