Less Healthy, More Clarity

In January this year, new rules in the CAP and BCAP Codes on advertising “less healthy” food and drink came into force. The headline restriction is straightforward: adverts for an identifiable less healthy product cannot appear on television before 9pm, or as paid-for advertising online at all. What has been much less straightforward, until recently, is working out exactly when a product counts as “identifiable” for these purposes, and when an advert is really just promoting a brand.

Several Advertising Standards Authority rulings have started to fill in that gap. Now two further ASA decisions published today (23 July) add useful data points, one for McDonald's McDelivery and the other for Domino’s Pizza.

The McDonald's advert, which aired between 8.15pm and 9pm on 11th to 13th January 2026, just after the new rules came into force, showed no food or drink on screen at any point. Instead, it followed a group of people from different households confirming they would join a McDelivery order, with three of them naming specific menu items along the way: a “McNuggets” medium meal, a McCrispy, and a McChicken Sandwich. Two complainants argued this made the advert one for an identifiable less healthy product shown at the wrong time of day. 

The ASA’s test has two stages. First, would UK consumers reasonably be expected to identify the advert as being for a particular product. Second, is that product actually “less healthy”, meaning it is both classified as HFSS under the government's Nutrient Profiling Model and falls within a relevant food category. Brand advertising, promoting a brand or range generally rather than a specific product, sits outside the rules altogether, but naming specific items can take an advert out of that exemption.

On the facts, the McCrispy and McChicken Sandwich were confirmed as not being HFSS foods, so neither engaged the rules. The more interesting point concerned the McNuggets reference. The advert did not specify “Chicken McNuggets”, but since that was the only McNuggets product on the menu at the time, the ASA treated the reference as being to that specific, non-HFSS item. The wider “medium meal” around it, which could include a side from four options, a drink from thirty, and an optional dip, was not treated as identifiable, because none of those components were individually named or fixed. The ASA agreed with Clearcast that the advert’s focus was the collective, sociable nature of ordering through McDelivery, with the three product references being brief and incidental to that wider message. The complaint was not upheld, and no breach of BCAP rule 32.21 was found. 

The Domino’s Ad for its “Cheeky Little Pizza”, on the other hand, did not withstand contact with the ASA scrutiny. The TV, video on-demand and YouTube ads were also live in January 2026. The TV and VOD ad featured shots of a meat pizza and a vegetable pizza. The voice-over stated “Domino’s for just four quid? Yep, cheeky little pizzas at a cheeky little price.” Meanwhile, the YouTube ad included an image of the pizza together with text that stated “£4 lunch order ahead on our app” and “Cheeky Little Pizza". Domino’s came clean and admitted that it had used the wrong figures when calculating the Nutrient Profile for the Sausage and Bacon pizza featured in the ad. In fact, the pizza was an LHF product that should not have been advertised before the watershed. Fortunately, it wasn’t a Fiorentina pizza, or we would have to say that Domino's was left with egg on its face. Still, they deserve praise for being more ‘honourable’ than a certain former customer of the Pizza Express in Woking.

In fact, Domino’s has not only withdrawn their advertising for the Sausage and Bacon pizza, but they’ve withdrawn the product itself, which seems a tad excessive! They’ve also reviewed their nutritional assessment processes to ensure they don’t make the same mistake again. So, in the future, there’ll be no sausage, no bacon and no porkies of any kind.

Read alongside some of the earlier rulings which we discussed here, a reasonably coherent picture is emerging. German Doner Kebab and On The Beach both escaped findings of breach because the less healthy content in their adverts, a Diet Coke in one case, a doughnut briefly glimpsed in a buffet in the other, was genuinely incidental to adverts with a different primary focus. Iceland and Lidl, by contrast, were both found in breach, because their adverts gave prominent, product-led treatment to identifiable HFSS items, price tags and close-up footage included. The McDonald’s ruling sits comfortably alongside that pattern: name a compliant product prominently, keep everything else generic, and the brand advertising exemption should hold.

For advertisers, that is a genuinely useful, if narrow, piece of clarity. The “identifiable product” test is turning out to be a real filter rather than a formality, and it rewards precise drafting of the products referenced in a script, right down to which menu items are named and which are left as unspecified choices within a meal.

That clarity may, however, be short-lived. As we reported last week, the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee's report, Food and Weight Management: Fixing the food environment, published on 15 July, argues that the current rules do not go far enough precisely because they only capture adverts for specific products, not the brands or ranges that sell them. The Committee wants brand and range advertising brought within scope, which would remove the very distinction that these rulings have just spent seven months clarifying. Advertisers who have finally worked out where the current lines are drawn may find Parliament redrawing the map before the ink is dry.

"We told Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland Ltd t/a Domino’s to ensure that their paid ads on the internet were not for an identifiable “less healthy” food. We also told them to ensure they provided accurate nutrient profile information to Clearcast." Advertising Standards Authority

 www.asa.org.uk/...