If you sell food or drink and you’re thinking about advertising on TV, you’ll run into the letters HFSS sooner or later. They stand for high in fat, salt or sugar, and since January 2026 there have been new legal limits on when and where products like that can be advertised.
The rules are fiddly in places, and plenty of businesses assume they’re banned from TV when they aren’t. What follows is a summary and not legal advice, so please treat it as a starting point.
What changed in January 2026
The new restrictions became law on 5 January 2026, although most advertisers and broadcasters had been following them voluntarily since October 2025. On TV, adverts for “less healthy” food and drink can’t be shown between 5.30am and 9pm, and that covers the broadcasters’ on-demand services, such as ITVX, as well as their live channels. Online, paid-for advertising of those products isn’t allowed at any time of day.
The Advertising Standards Authority is the main regulator, with Ofcom behind it, and the law firm Wiggin has published a useful summary of the restrictions if you’d like the legal detail.
What counts as “less healthy”?
“Less healthy” is the phrase the law uses, and it’s a little narrower than HFSS, the trade’s older shorthand, because a product has to meet two tests before it’s caught. First, it has to fall into one of 13 categories set out in the regulations, which cover the sort of things you’d expect, such as soft drinks, confectionery, crisps, cakes, ice cream, breakfast cereals, pizza and ready meals. Second, it has to reach a set score on the government’s nutrient profiling model, which weighs up things like sugar, salt and saturated fat against fibre, protein, fruit and vegetables. Reaching that score is what makes a product HFSS.
A product only counts as “less healthy” if it does both, so you can’t tell from the category alone, and plenty of products inside those categories come out on the right side. The score is a piece of arithmetic based on the product’s nutritional figures, and it needs to be done properly for each product you want to feature, because the answer isn’t always the one you’d guess.
Domino’s found out how much can rest on that sum. One of the pizzas in an advert it ran on TV before 9pm in January 2026 had been scored just under the threshold, and the advert was cleared on that basis. It later emerged that one of the figures used in the calculation was wrong, and with the correct figure the pizza was over the line. The ASA upheld the complaints that July, even though everybody involved had acted on the numbers in front of them, and Domino’s withdrew the advert. Responsibility for the figures stays with the advertiser, in other words, which is a good reason to have a borderline product’s score double-checked before an advert is built around it.
Smaller businesses are exempt
Before any of that scoring comes into it, there’s a simpler question to ask, and it’s the one that matters most to many of the businesses we talk to. The new restrictions don’t apply to food and drink businesses with fewer than 250 employees. If you’re a smaller business, such as a local restaurant, a regional bakery or a family food brand, the 9pm rule doesn’t apply to you.
The thing to check is how the 250 is counted, because a franchise is counted as a whole. In July 2026 the ASA upheld a complaint about a paid Instagram advert placed by a single franchised takeaway, on the grounds that a franchisee is treated as part of the franchisor’s business, and the chain as a whole employed more than 250 people. A franchise outlet with a handful of staff isn’t a small business as far as these rules are concerned.
The exemption isn’t something that just happens, either. To use it, you sign a short declaration confirming that your business, including any franchise staff, had fewer than 250 employees on 6 April that year, and that you understand it’s your responsibility to get that right. It has to be signed by you rather than by us, because the law puts the duty on the advertiser, but it’s a single page and we’ll tell you when it’s needed and send it in alongside the script. It only lasts a year, so if the advert is still on air the following April, or you make a new one, you sign a fresh one.
Being exempt doesn’t mean there are no rules at all. The older advertising code still applies to everybody, and it has long restricted HFSS adverts in and around programmes made for children or likely to appeal particularly to them. Even so, a smaller food business has far more freedom on TV than the headlines suggest.
Brand adverts are still allowed
There’s another important exemption, and this one applies even to the biggest companies. The restrictions are aimed at adverts for identifiable less healthy products, so an advert that promotes a brand without showing one of those products can still run before 9pm. It’s why you may have noticed some well-known food brands advertising in a different way lately, with more about the name, the story or the healthier end of the range, and less of the product itself.
The test the ASA applies is whether people watching could reasonably be expected to identify the advert as being for a particular less healthy product. That makes it a question about what’s on the screen and in the script. A named product, a pack shot or a lingering close-up will usually settle it one way, and an advert built around the people, the place and the name will usually settle it the other. Between the two it can be a fine judgement, which is why it’s best made on the storyboard, when swapping one shot for another costs next to nothing.
What if food only appears in the background?
The same test matters to businesses that don’t sell food at all. The rules aren’t limited to food companies, so in principle a hotel, a holiday park or a shopping centre could be caught by what’s on the table in one of its shots. The ASA considered exactly this in April 2026, after a viewer complained about a TV advert for the holiday company On the Beach, shown before 9pm, in which a boy helps himself to a chocolate doughnut in an airport lounge. The complaint wasn’t upheld, because viewers would have understood the advert to be about free lounge access and not about the doughnut. Food that’s part of the scenery is generally fine, and the question only arises once the camera starts selling it.
What isn’t covered
Some kinds of advertising sit outside the new restrictions altogether. Radio and other audio-only advertising isn’t included, and neither are a business’s own website and its unpaid social media posts. Outdoor advertising, from billboards and bus shelters to digital screens, isn’t covered by these rules either, although some councils and transport networks have policies of their own.
The rules may get tighter
It would be a mistake to treat any of this as settled. The scoring model is more than twenty years old, and in March 2026 the government opened a consultation on replacing it with an updated one, which could bring in products often thought of as healthier, such as some sweetened cereals and fruit yoghurts. That July, a committee of MPs recommended going further, by bringing brand advertising within the restrictions and banning outdoor advertising of HFSS food.
Neither had been decided when we last updated this guide in October 2026. If your product scores close to the line, though, or your plans lean on the brand exemption, it’s sensible to check where things stand before each new campaign and not only before the first.
What it means if you want to advertise on TV
If you’re a food or drink business, the questions to answer before any creative work starts are:
- How many employees does the business have?
- Does the product you want to show fall into one of the restricted categories, and how does it score?
- If it is restricted, would airtime after 9pm work for your audience, or would a brand-led advert do the job?
The last of those deserves an open mind, because for a product that’s bought by adults, the hours after 9pm are far from a poor second choice, and some of the most watched programmes of the week go out then.
Clearcast will ask about all of this when the script is submitted, so it’s far better to know the answers at the beginning than to find out halfway through, and for anything complicated we’d recommend speaking to a legal or regulatory specialist.
We’ll help you work out where you stand and shape the idea to fit, and we’ll deal with Clearcast on your behalf. Get in touch if you’d like to talk it over.
Keep reading.
Subtitles on TV ads: what ITV and Channel 4 now require
Channel 4 has required subtitles on every advert since March 2026, and ITV follows in January 2027. Here’s what’s changed…
Getting a TV ad on air: the Clearcast process explained
Every TV advert in the UK has to be approved by Clearcast before it can go on air. Here is…
How long are ITV ad breaks?
A break on ITV1 can last up to 3 minutes 50 seconds. Here are the Ofcom rules behind that, and…
Ready when you are.
Tell us a little about what you're hoping to achieve and we'll take it from there.
Let's talk about your campaign