Danish fat tax is dead

The Danish “fat tax” which during 2012 added around 30 eurocents to every 250g pack of butter in the land,  has been abandoned this month as unworkable. The country’s Minister of Agriculture Mette Gjerskov had earlier declared the tax a useful tool in reducing consumption of saturated fats. But it seems that national diets had not, in fact, been influenced. Instead, a significant proportion of Danish consumers appeared to have simply changed their respective retail outlets and bought butter, cream, cheeses and other high-fat foods across the border in German discounters where the products were without fat tax and basically cheaper in the first place.

Introduced in autumn 2011, the tax was the first of its kind in the world and represented a retail sale levy equivalent to €2.15 on every kg of saturated fatty acids in food. As reported in Dairy Industries International at the time, the official aim was to improve the health of the average Danish consumer (the proportion of overweight people in the Danish population is put at around 47 %).

Dairy farmers at that time went to the barricades claiming that the imposed retail levy was nothing less than a new way of increasing Denmark’s fiscal income.

Denmark was also planning to introduce the same sort of “health” tax on foods with high levels of sugars – for sweets, lemonade and cakes – starting this year. The idea has already been abandoned.