Meet the Bite Back campaign and learn how food advertisements could affect your choices
Bite Back GM
Bite Back is a youth activist movement challenging a food system that’s been set up to fool us all. Learn more about the campaign, the group’s findings and how you can get involved.
Who are Bite Back?
We are a group of young people living in Greater Manchester and we are part of Bite Back, a youth activist movement challenging a food system that’s been set up to fool us all.
Greater Manchester is flooded with junk food ads. When we walk to school, get on the bus, wait at a station, use the tram or just spend time in our town centres, we are surrounded. These types of ads have been shown to increase children’s recognition of brands, as well as increasing the amount of unhealthy food children ask for, buy and eat.
Read this article to see how this problem manifests for the almost 700,000 young people living in Greater Manchester, and to inspire you to use your power to restrict junk food ads from flooding our region and contributing to the ill health of a generation.
What was the project?
On Thursday 21 September 2023 and Monday 23 October, the Biteback team spent time walking round Manchester city centre taking photos of every junk food ad we could see. We also drove up to Bury, down to Stockport and out to Oldham, documenting the ads we saw on the way and those in the town centres.
Wow! There are A LOT of adverts for junk food in Greater Manchester. Once you start documenting it, it blows your mind! We came across 178 junk food ads in total, from loads of different brands.
The evidence we have collected is by no way exhaustive. It is a snapshot of what we say on a couple of days in Autumn 2023. We didn’t manage to get to the boroughs of Wigan, Bolton, Salford, Tameside, Rochdale or Trafford, but hope our evidence gives you a good picture of the region. We urge leaders of all Greater Manchester boroughs to take action to address this problem.
Brooke, 16, Ashton Under-Lyne, Bite Back
“As someone who gets the bus almost every day, it’s not unusual to see ads for things like burgers, chips, chocolate and fizzy drinks at every odd stop.”
What did we find?
1. Every step of our journeys, we are bombarded
Most junk food ads we saw (56%) were found on the public transport network- bus stops, buses, tram platforms and train stations. Bus stops were particularly bad, with 82 ads (46%) found on them alone.
2. When we’re in the city centre, it’s inescapable
Of all the places we visited, there was nowhere more densly packed with junk food ads than Manchester city centre. We focused our attention on the are from Manchester Piccadilly, across to Victoria, down to Deansgate and then back up to Piccadilly. Within this area, we found 101 junk food ads.
Piccadilly Gardens was particularly saturated, especially in and around the tram platform and the bus stops on Parker Street.
3. It’s just as bad across the city region
Leaving the city centre doesn’t end the bombardment. We travelled up Bury New Road (A56) and by the time we got to Bury, we had seen 16 junk food ads, mostly on bus stops. In Bury, we found another 3. We also travelled down Oldham Road (A62) into Manchester, and saw 18 junk food ads, after seeing 6 in Oldham itself. We went down the A6 and saw 18 along the route, and 10 in Stockport town centre.
4. A wide range of products and brands
We encountered loads of different brands and products during our search, including things like chocolate, ice cream, burgers, sugary drinks and pizza. In total we saw 178 junk food ads. The brand that we saw most often was Costa; there were 34 HFSS (High in Fat, Salt, and Sugar) ads, promoting two different products, from them alone.
Get Involved
Want to get involved with the Bite Back movement? Check out their website for further information, resources and to sign up.
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