Companies Agree to Expand Age Coverage under Children's Food & Beverage Advertising Initiative Core Principles

Under CFBAI’s Core Principles, participating companies voluntarily agree to advertise only foods or beverages that meet CFBAI’s Uniform Nutrition Criteria or to not advertise foods at all in child-directed advertising across a wide range of child-directed media. 

The current Core Principles address food advertising to children under age 12. The 6th Edition revision expands the requirement of participants to include children under age 13, which means programming with an audience of 30% or more children.

This change aligns with the recently updated Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) Advertising Guidelines, which were revised to apply to advertising to children under age 13 as of  January 2022. CARU, an independent industry self-regulation program monitoring child-directed media for responsible advertising practices, shares oversight of the self-regulation of advertising to children with CFBAI. CARU’s Guidelines focus primarily on the substantive content of child-directed advertising for all products and apply to any company that advertises products or services to children. 

In contrast, CFBAI is a pledge program under which participating companies agreed to abide by the Core Principles, which define what is covered by “food advertising to children,” and then apply nutritional and media coverage. 

The upcoming change to CFBAI’s age coverage from under age 12 to under age 13, which takes effect January 1, 2023, represents the participants’ continued, active commitment to responsible advertising to children.