Uganda’s Policymakers Commit to Warning Labels on Unhealthy Food

How a single day of dialogue with 70 policymakers and partners moved Uganda closer to clear warnings on foods high in salt, sugar, and fat, and why we will not let the momentum slip.

Pick up a packet of biscuits, a soda or a bag of crisps in any Kampala supermarket and turn it over. Somewhere on the back, in very small print, is a table of numbers. Sodium, so many milligrams. Saturated fat, so many grams. Quick question: is that a lot?

Most of us have no idea. Honestly, that is exactly how the people who make these products prefer it.

Uganda is eating differently from a generation ago. Ultra-processed snacks and sugary drinks have quietly moved from occasional treats to daily habits, especially for children and young people. According to the World Health Organization, noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and some cancers now cause about a third of all deaths in Uganda, and the average Ugandan faces roughly a one in five chance of dying early from one of them. By 2022, more than a quarter of Ugandan women were overweight or obese, and women in towns were more than twice as likely to be obese as women in villages.

A warning on the front of a packet will not fix all of that. But it is one of the simplest and best tested ways to let a mother in a supermarket aisle see, in two seconds, what she is really buying.

On 13th July 2026, CEFROHT, with support from Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI), brought 70 stakeholders together for a full-day hybrid dialogue. Around the table sat the Ministry of Health’s Nutrition Division and its NCD and Health Promotion departments, the Uganda National Bureau of Standards, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives, the Uganda Parliamentary Alliance on Food and Nutrition Security, WHO and UNICEF. In other words, the people who will write, pass, and enforce Uganda’s next food rules.

Why start with them? Because Uganda already has the tool. The Ministry of Health has signed and launched the Uganda Nutrient Profile Model (NPM), a scientific yardstick that sets clear limits for salt, sugar, and fat in packaged foods, and CEFROHT supported that process from the start with legal, human rights, and public health expertise. Signed is good. Enforced is better. The dialogue opened a capacity-building Programme we designed to close exactly that gap.

“A signed document protects nobody until it becomes a rule that someone can enforce.”

The day moved fast. Policymakers walked through how the NPM works and how it decides which products should carry a warning. They worked through the legal questions every regulator must answer, from trade rules and trademarks to enforcement and the legal basis for making labels mandatory. They studied Chile, where bold black warning labels changed what families bought and pushed companies to reformulate their products, and Mexico, which followed Chile’s lead. And they spoke frankly about the food industry: who lobbies, which arguments they use, and how governments elsewhere held their ground.

Then came the evidence from home. A national landscape survey of processed and ultra-processed foods on Ugandan shelves was presented and validated. Its message was hard to ignore. A high proportion of the products surveyed exceed the NPM limits for sodium, saturated fat and total fat. These are not exotic imports. They are what our children eat.

By the close of the day, the conversation had turned into promises. The room reached a shared consensus to push for a mandatory Front of Pack Warning Labelling regulation for Uganda. Not voluntary. Mandatory, because a voluntary label is one the industry can simply choose to ignore. Government stakeholders, led by the Ministry of Health, committed to turn the signed NPM into binding, enforceable thresholds for those labels.

Policymakers also committed to protect the drafting and adoption process from food industry lobbying and interference. And if the meddling comes, litigation is on the table, drawing on lessons from Uganda’s tobacco control journey, where public health law was challenged by industry and held firm.

Why a rights organization cares about a label

Participants also agreed on something we have argued for years. Front-of-pack warnings are not a favor from manufacturers. They flow from the right to health, the right to adequate food and the right to access information. Knowing what is in your food is not a luxury. It is your right.

That is where CEFROHT stands apart. We are lawyers and public health advocates working at the meeting point of food, health, and human rights. We help write the evidence into policy, we help write the policy into law, and if anyone tries to derail it, we know the way to the courtroom.

This dialogue was only the first session. The Programme continues with policymakers on legal tools, conflicts of interest, and the other measures the NPM makes possible, from limiting junk food marketing to children to healthier public food procurement and taxes on sugary drinks.

So the next time you pick up a packet, ask yourself one question: why doesn’t the front tell me the truth? Then help us change that. Share this story, support our food policy work, or partner with us at info@cefroht.org.