Navigating health claims and misleading names in the baby-food aisle
28 October 2026Irene is a Researcher at ATNi, Food Technologist, and mom of 2 kids under 4. She has contributed to ATNi’s 2024 Complementary Food Index and the 2026 Healthy Starts Assessment, read the latest books and apps, and still was struck by the challenge of finding healthy options in the baby-food aisle. In this guest blog, Irene shares her reflections over the critical complementary feeding period through the lens of a nutrition researcher and a mother.
In many ways, I was lucky. My son was an enthusiastic eater who happily tried almost anything I placed in front of him. He learned to chew and swallow solid foods, and we gradually learned to remain calm and trust the process. He grew as health care professionals expected him to do. And yet, feeding him remained one of the biggest items on my mental to-do list.
As someone with a background in food technology who works in nutrition, it felt especially important to lay a healthy foundation for my son’s future relationship with food. It also felt overwhelming. Even with all the information needed to make the best-informed decision, feeding a baby brings a particular kind of mental load. There is the fear of choking, the planning required to make family meals suitable for the youngest person at the table and the persistent worry that the baby may be eating too little, too much or not enough of the “right” foods. All this often happens while parents are sleep-deprived, going back to their full-time jobs, and in general still adjusting to life with a new child. When I began complementary feeding, I expected products marketed for babies to meet their nutritional needs—what I found on market shelves showed me a different picture.
After a full day away from home, I headed into a supermarket looking for something my son could eat—food with an appropriate texture, no added salt or sugar, and enough nutritional value to count as a meal. I expected the baby-food aisle to make that task easier. Instead, I found sweet purées, biscuits, selective product names and marketing claims that did not always reflect what was inside the package.
That was the first time I was really paying attention to which products were being marketed for babies in supermarkets. Were biscuits really products intended for babies? Could added sugar legally be used in commercial complementary foods in the European Union (EU)? The answer to both questions was yes.
Commercial complementary foods are products marketed for infants and young children between 6 and 36 months of age.
In the EU, products marketed as processed cereal-based foods and baby foods must comply with category-specific compositional limits under Directive 2006/125/EC, which permits the addition of sugars such as sucrose, fructose, glucose, glucose syrup and honey to certain infant cereals, rusks and biscuits, within prescribed limits. In other words, there is no blanket prohibition on adding sugar to foods marketed for babies, despite the WHO, along with other health agencies like the NHS, recommending that added sugars should not be added to complementary foods for infants and young children.
International public health guidance recommends offering young children varied and nutrient-dense foods, minimizing refined grains and avoiding foods high in sugar, salt and unhealthy fats during the complementary-feeding period. So why were products like biscuits with added sugars being marketed specifically for babies?
[The following images were ai-generated to depict the marketing claims and ingredients of similar biscuits marketed to infants and young children.]
Only around 35% of commercially available complementary foods (out of 1,265 eligible products) produced by six major companies across ten countries met all applicable nutrient-composition criteria against the WHO European Nutrient and Promotion Profile Model. This finding comes from ATNi’s 2024 Complementary Foods Product Profile assessment of the nutritional composition, labelling and marketing of commercially available complementary foods. None of the products met all the labelling and promotional requirements recommended by the WHO, while 59% of the products to which the relevant criterion applied would have required a front-of-pack “high sugar” warning under the model.
Given the vulnerability of the intended audience—both infants and young children, and the often-exhausted caregivers making decisions on their behalf—commercial complementary foods should be subject to stricter rules, not only on their nutritional composition but also on how they are marketed.
This should include greater scrutiny of the ages from which products are promoted. For example, companies should not be allowed to market biscuits for babies from eight months of age when public health guidance recommends limiting refined grains and avoiding foods high in sugar during the first two years of life. Products such as biscuits are nutritionally unnecessary and may displace more nutrient-dense foods at a critical stage of growth and development.
Manufacturers should be held accountable for these choices. They decide which products reach supermarket shelves, how those products are formulated and how they are presented to families. In doing so, they help shape dietary norms and consumption patterns from a very early age. That influence carries a significant responsibility. Companies should make healthier choices easier for parents, rather than encouraging children to develop a greater reliance on sweet and highly processed foods.
Parents have enough on their minds and to-do lists without needing to apply professional-level scrutiny to every nutrition label and marketing claim. I’ll admit that reading ingredient lists feels more like a hobby to me, but caregivers should not have to decode packaging to determine whether a product is truly healthy. While it is encouraging to see some companies developing products with better nutritional profiles, progress overall remains uneven, and better individual products are not enough.
The composition of many commercial complementary foods still needs improvement. For example:
- Product names should accurately reflect their main ingredients.
- Added sugars and sweetening agents should be eliminated.
- Smooth purées should not be promoted as everyday snacks for children old enough to eat more varied textures.
- Products should not rely on organic certification or selective ingredient names to create a stronger impression of healthfulness than their composition supports.
These are only some of the most visible issues. The WHO model sets requirements across a much wider set of nutritional and labelling characteristics, and ATNi’s assessment found gaps across many of them.
Not to mention, marketing also extends far beyond the label. Products are promoted through supermarket displays, retailer websites, social media, influencers and health-oriented claims. WHO and several studies have concluded that food marketing affects children’s food choices, dietary intake, purchase requests and beliefs about what constitutes normal food.
Manufacturers should not wait for regulation to catch up before taking action. The WHO European Nutrient and Promotion Profile Model already sets a benchmark for best practice in product composition, labelling, and promotion, and companies have the expertise and resources to align with these standards now—even where national regulations fall short.
Policymakers, meanwhile, need to translate international recommendations into clear, enforceable standards for product composition and marketing. This is where independent assessment plays a critical role. By benchmarking products against the WHO model, market by market, ATNi can make clear where the gaps lie—which criteria are most often missed, which companies are making progress, and which are lagging behind. This evidence gives governments a stronger basis for regulation grounded in the realities of the market, gives companies a clear view of how their portfolios compare with best practice and with their peers, and gives civil society a concrete basis for holding both to account. Measuring the market helps turn recommendations into accountability, and accountability into pressure for change.
As a food technologist and a mother, I believe commercial complementary foods can play a role in the diets of infants and young children—but only when they are appropriately formulated, transparently labelled and responsibly marketed.
Parents should not need specialist training to determine whether a product marketed for their baby is genuinely suitable. They should be able to trust the baby-food aisle.
Note from ATNi: Many thanks for sharing your perspective and insights in this guest blog, Irene. And thanks to you for reading. To learn more about the latest research on complementary foods in Kenya and Bangladesh, check out ATNi’s brand new Healthy Starts 2026 report here.