What we eat, how much we drink and how active we are is heavily shaped by our environment. Creating the right environment can encourage people to take responsibility for their health and make healthy choices. Carlsberg has long recognised the potential for businesses to help tackle public health issues. This is also the pivotal point for the partnership with the Department of Health, which is the government department that facilitates the Public Health Responsibility Deal.

As a part of the Responsibility Deal, Carlsberg commits to take action to improve public health by signing a series of pledges. These pledges cover four areas; responsible drinking, health in the workplace, labelling of products, and advertising and marketing.

The pledges are stated as below:


 Alcohol labelling: We will ensure that over 80% of products on shelf (by December 2013) will have labels with clear unit content, NHS guidelines[1] and a warning about drinking when pregnant.

Support for Drinkaware: We commit to maintaining the levels of financial support and in-kind funding for Drinkaware and the “Why let the Good times go bad?” campaign as set out in the Memoranda of Understanding between Industry, Government and Drinkaware.

Awareness of alcohol units: We will provide simple and consistent information in the on-trade (e.g. pubs and clubs), to raise awareness of the unit content of alcoholic drinks, and we will also explore together with health bodies how messages around drinking guidelines and the associated health harms might be communicated.

Awareness of alcohol units, calories & other information: We will provide simple and consistent information as appropriate in the off-trade (supermarkets and off-licenses) as well as other marketing channels (e.g. in-store magazines), to raise awareness of the units, calorie content of alcoholic drinks, NHS lower-risk drinking guidelines, and the health harms associated with exceeding the guidelines.

Tackling under-age alcohol sales: We commit to ensuring effective action is taken in all premises to reduce and prevent under-age sales of alcohol (primarily through rigorous application of Challenge 21 and Challenge 25).

 Advertising & Marketing alcohol: We commit to further action on advertising and marketing, namely the development of a new sponsorship code requiring the promotion of responsible drinking, not putting alcohol adverts on outdoor poster sites within 100m of schools and adhering to the Drinkaware brand guidelines to ensure clear and consistent usage.

Community actions to tackle alcohol harms: In local communities we will provide support for schemes appropriate for local areas that wish to use them to address issues around social and health harms, and will act together to improve joined up working between such schemes operating in local areas.

As a signatory of the Responsibility Deal, Carlsberg UK will report on the progress made on the above pledges that Carlsberg has committed to.