Jamie's Italian cut sugary drink sales 9.3% with a 10p levy and a redesigned menu
A 10p levy on sugary drinks plus new lower-sugar options cut per-customer sugary drink sales 11% in 12 weeks across Jamie's Italian's 37 restaurants.
What was changed
In September 2015 Jamie's Italian, Jamie Oliver's UK restaurant chain, added a 10p levy (about 3%) to sugar-sweetened soft drinks across 37 restaurants. At the same time it put low-sugar fruit spritzers — fruit juice mixed with water — on the menu and redesigned the menu so it explained, in plain terms, why the levy existed. Oliver said the money raised would go to charity.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge analysed the chain's soft-drink sales before and after. Sales of sugar-sweetened drinks per customer fell 11% after 12 weeks and 9.3% after six months. Fruit juice sales rose 22% six months in. Overall soft-drink volume per customer also drifted down, including diet drinks and bottled water, and the researchers suspected some customers switched to unrecorded tap water.
The study appeared in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in October 2017, just as the UK prepared to introduce its own tax on high-sugar soft drinks in April 2018. The authors were careful: no other chain was studied as a control, so the price rise alone could not be isolated as the cause. Oxford's Susan Jebb still called the findings encouraging news for public health.
The move was cheap to copy: a visible price nudge, a better default on the menu, and a reason printed next to it. That combination — not the 10p itself — is what other hospitality operators could take from the case.
Why it worked
Jamie Oliver had been the most vocal restaurant-world supporter of the UK sugar tax and wanted his own chain to act on sugar before any law forced it.
A 10p levy was small enough to avoid a customer backlash while still signalling which drinks the chain wanted people to rethink.
Adding lower-sugar spritzers gave customers somewhere to go; explaining the levy on the menu gave them a reason to accept it.
The chain could measure the effect across all 37 UK restaurants, turning a pricing tweak into published evidence.
What can be applied
A small, visible price signal paired with better alternatives and an honest explanation can shift customer behaviour where a ban would breed resentment.
Aftermath
The LSHTM/Cambridge study was published in October 2017 as the UK's own sugary drink tax approached for April 2018. Its authors cautioned that the drop could not be pinned on price alone — there was no comparison chain, tap-water and alcohol sales went unrecorded, and adult and children's orders were not separated. Professor Steven Cummins said a small levy coupled with menu redesign 'may have the potential to change consumer behaviour'; statistician Kevin McConway called the levy's role plausible but wanted longer follow-up in other restaurants.