Meet Bite Back - the youth-led group campaigning against UK's junk food ads

In April 2025, mysterious billboards began to appear acrossLondon. They cropped up on buses and along buildings. They were all black, with large white text. They had one simple mission: to take ad space from junk food companies.

Now, the group behind them, Bite Back, say their ads are being suppressed by two of the UK’s biggest outdoor advertisers.

Bite Back are a youth-led activist group set up to tackling one of the most insidious issues in the UK: junkfood advertising. Or as they put it, “a food system that’s fooled us all.”

It's also one that disproportionately effects young people. According to their own research, the ten biggest food chains that appeal to young people have grown in number of outlets by 59% between 2014 to 2024. Meanwhile, in a 2021 study they found that almost 500 online junk food ads are shown to children in the UK every second.

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Bite Back’s demands are clear. They want a 9pm watershed on junk food advertising, which was meant come into effect in October, but it is now being delayed to January 2026. They also want a complete ban of junk food advertising online and in our open spaces.

Farid, a 17-year-old activist from Manchester, has been campaigning with Bite Back. On their website, he stated: "The changes we’re calling for are about more than just ads — they’re about holding junk food companies accountable for how their marketing harms children’s health, and shifting the balance of power away from industry and towards policies that actually prioritise young people.”

As part of the group's most recent #CommercialBreak campaign, they set up billboards across London reading: “Young activists bought this ad space so the junk food giants couldn’t”. It quickly gained momentum and was even awarded the Sheila McKechnie Awards for Best Consumer Campaign.

However, the group claim the ads were taken down just says later by the two largest outdoor advertising companies, JCDeaux and Global. Together, they control an estimated 70% of the UK’s digital outdoor ad space, according to Bite Back. The Mirror has reached out to JCDeaux and Global for comment.

Farid believes the advertisers are actively trying to push back against them. He told The Mirror: “The billboards were set up as a symbolic show of resistance against the efforts that brands are taking to play a starring role in young people's minds.

“Unfortunately, a couple days before, it got pulled by one of the biggest outdoor advertisers, and a couple weeks after it got pulled by the second biggest outdoor advertisers. The issue is: they see us, they hear us, but they're actively trying to work against us. And in order to prioritise profit on their end these are the lengths that they're going to.”

Farid felt compelled to join Bite Back after seeing the detrimental impact fast food had on his community. One thing that struck him was seeing how his younger brother could recite junk food slogans like they were written on the back of his hand. “That is representative of millions and millions of young children up in another country who are subject to predatory marketing tactics,” he says.

It also had a negative impact on his own lifestyle growing up. He continues: “I’m a football man. Trying to find that balance and have a healthy lifestyle was extremely difficult. I mean, you walk onto your local high street and it's just covered with junk food. You go online thinking you get a break, where it's not the case at all.”

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When it comes to the suppression of their billboards, Farid and his fellow Bite Back activists are determined to keep fighting. On Wednesday 9 July, the group led a mock parliamentary enquiry into the impact of outdoor junk food advertising on young people’s health.

Farid says he wants the government to “take a sense of accountability and realise the massive impact that massive food companies have over the lives of millions and millions of people and listen to our voice as well. I think that would be ideal then kind of accelerating the progress that we can make.”

As for what people can do to support, Farid encourages people to engage with Bite Back's social media pages and to have more conversations surrounding the problems that come with junk food advertising. He says: "I think that's the most important thing, for people to realise the issue at hand and jump onto our cause in order to be able to solve that issue."

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