Lidl and Iceland have become the first brands to fall foul of the UK's new less healthy food rules. An Instagram influencer post for Lidl. A Daily Mail display banner for Iceland. Both ruled against. The first of many, I suspect.

The rulings have put HFSS firmly back in everyone's feed, or so it seems. At least, it's all over my LinkedIn algorithm. What's struck me is how much of the commentary is coming from policy, legal or media voices, not from inside the rooms where the rules actually impact a brief or a business.

One thing upfront: I'm not a CMO. Not twenty years in. There are people far better placed to weigh in on this than me. What I can offer is nearly five years in the Central Brand Team at Europe's leading frozen food group, having stepped out in March, and a small step back from the daily churn of it.

What I find myself circling back to is this. Most of the framing I hear is media-facing: what you can run, what you can't, which channels are squeezed. All of it real, all of it worth talking about. But I wonder if it's the top half of the picture, not the whole of it.

Underneath the ad restrictions, HFSS is putting pressure on something more fundamental: how food brands build demand in the first place. I'm not immune. I've written briefs that leaned on exactly the mechanics the new rules are squeezing. Product temptation-led creative, heavy promotional cycles, performance paid media, short-term demand plays.

Plenty of brands use those tactics brilliantly. Plenty of others have been running brand-led work for years. Look at McDonald's leading with the Golden Arches, no burger in sight. The question HFSS raises isn't whether brand-led works. We know it does. It's how exposed a brand is if its growth has leaned on tactics the rules are now constraining.

My take: the brands that will feel this most aren't the ones with the weakest creative. They're the ones whose growth model has been most dependent on those tactics. That runs right through the business. Promotions, CRM, partnerships, community activity, retail mechanics.

Lidl's ruling makes the tension concrete: Lidl argued the post was brand-led; the ASA disagreed because a pastry close-up shot meant the product felt too identifiable. The line between brand-led and product-led work is, I think, the operating question of the next few years.

The question food brands haven't had to ask

Food brands have always thought about values when it comes to influencers, partnerships and alignment. Good teams run those decisions through a ‘does this feel right?’ filter, and have done for years. What they haven't had to do is run their own product imagery through the same filter.

In the UK, food lust is cultural currency. Lurpak built a brand world on showing how everything it touches tastes infinitely better, and for decades no one has had to ask whether that's a story we can tell. Or at least, before 9pm…?

HFSS is, in effect, asking that question for the first time. The line between compliant and credible is being drawn inside your own product imagery now, not just outside it. That's a bigger shift than any individual ruling.

What brands need to know

Growth models get tested before ads do. If a brand's been carrying growth on product temptation and promotional dependency, HFSS will hurt it regardless of how good its agency is. The fix, I think, lives upstream: in how demand is built, not how it's advertised.

Paid performance won't carry the same weight. The channels HFSS constrains are the ones parts of the category have leaned on hardest. A balanced mix across owned, earned, experiential and brand-building paid work isn't a nice-to-have; it's where I think resilience comes from.

Operating models matter as much as creative ones. Iceland blamed a third-party data feed that surfaced HFSS products on a display banner. Martech stacks, ad ops, partner contracts, briefing templates, worth auditing now. The worst outcome of a regime like this isn't restriction; it's the hesitation that creeps in when no one's sure what's safe.

Everything non-paid still counts. Partnerships, creators, community work, CRM. Running them through a credibility lens, not only a legal one, feels increasingly non-optional.

None of this is to say HFSS is easy. It isn't. But framing it as a media problem lets the industry off the hook on the harder questions: how food brands have been building growth, and what filter they apply to their own imagery.

My bet is the brands in better shape won't be the ones with the cleverest compliance workaround. They'll be the ones who treat this as a prompt to sharpen their thinking. For me that's a conversation that belongs at the top of the marketing agenda, not buried in a legal memo.