How Britain snacks: what the national data shows

Two official sources tell us most of what national data can tell us about British snacking. DEFRA's Family Food survey tracks what households buy. The National Diet and Nutrition Survey records what people say they ate. Put together, they show a country buying a little less confectionery than twenty years ago, more than twice as many nuts, and spending a rising share of its food budget away from home.

What they do not publish is the figure most often quoted in arguments about snacking: the share of daily calories that comes from snacks.

What is the short answer?

• In the year ending 2025, households in England bought around 121 g of confectionery per person per week. In Northern Ireland the figure was about 173 g (Family Food regional dataset).
• Adults took 10.4% of their energy from free sugars in NDNS 2019 to 2023, against a recommendation of no more than 5%, and only 19% of adults met it (NDNS 2019 to 2023).
• No UK official statistic reports what proportion of daily energy comes from snacks. The figures in circulation come from research papers that each define a snack differently.

This is the data piece in a wider set on how snacking habits are changing, so every figure below is traceable to a published table.

What counts as a snack in the official figures?

Strictly speaking, nothing does.

Family Food is organised by food group, not by eating occasion. It records confectionery, biscuits and crisps whether they were eaten at a desk or with a meal. NDNS does record eating occasions in its 24-hour recalls, but the published 2019 to 2023 report reports intakes by food group and age, not by snack occasion.

That is why official figures cannot answer the simple version of the question. Academic papers that do split meals from snacks have to choose a rule, often an eating occasion supplying under 15% of the day's energy, or one outside conventional mealtimes. Change the rule and you change the answer. That is a large part of why estimates of calories from snacking vary so much, and why the evidence on the habit itself is hard to read.

What do British households buy?

These are purchases brought into the home, in grams per person per week, for the financial year ending 2025.

Source: DEFRA Family Food, countries and regions household purchases dataset, FYE 2025, published September 2026. Units are grams per person per week. Figures are rounded from the published file.

The broad pattern is clear. Northern Ireland buys more in almost every sweet snack category and the least in nuts and seeds. Within England, the regional rows point the other way in London, where confectionery and crisps per person per week both sit well below the English average. Regional rows carry wider error margins than the country rows, so they are better read as indicative than precise.

The longer series matters more than any single year. In England, confectionery purchases were about 127 g per person per week in 2001-02 and about 121 g in FYE 2025, so broadly flat. Crisps barely moved, at roughly 57 g in both years. Biscuits drifted down from about 163 g to 155 g. Nuts, seeds and peanut butter went from about 22 g to 48 g, more than doubling. That is the largest proportional change in any of these groups, and part of why whether nuts are actually healthy is worth asking carefully rather than assuming.

Against FYE 2022, DEFRA records confectionery purchases down 11.9% and biscuits and crispbreads down 2.6%. Year on year, the movement is much smaller and goes the other way: both rose slightly on FYE 2024, confectionery by 0.8% and biscuits and crispbreads by 1.1%. Over the same year, expenditure on food and drink eaten out reached 25% of the total food and drink bill, up from 24% in FYE 2024.

Has snacking gone up or down?

The national data cannot tell you cleanly, and the reason is methodological.

NDNS changed from paper food diaries to online 24-hour recalls in 2019. The survey team says plainly that results for 2019 to 2023 cannot be directly compared with earlier NDNS years. That breaks the one series that measured what people ate, just where a shift in snacking might have shown up.

Family Food does have an unbroken series back to 2001-02, and household purchase figures back to 1974. But it measures purchases rather than consumption, and it relies on households filling in a diary. DEFRA's own methodology note is direct about the limits: "in some cases, there is insufficient detail recorded on the diary to identify the correct food code, or quantities are not properly recorded" (About Family Food). The response rate for the underlying Living Costs and Food Survey in Great Britain was 26% in FYE 2025, two percentage points lower than the year before.

So the position is awkward but simple. One dataset measures the right thing and has a break in it. The other runs for longer and measures a proxy.

What does the data say about the diet itself?

Here the official figures are more useful, though still by food group rather than by occasion.

Source: NDNS 2019 to 2023 report, 4,370 participants, October 2019 to July 2023. Recommendations from the SACN Carbohydrates and Health report.

Free sugars sit at roughly twice the recommended share of energy in every group. Fewer than one in five adults, and fewer than one in ten children, met the free sugars recommendation, and 96% did not meet the fibre recommendation. The food group NDNS calls sugar, preserves and confectionery supplied 24% to 26% of adults' free sugars: a quarter, but not the largest share. Cereals and cereal products, a category that includes bread and breakfast cereals as well as cakes and biscuits, contributed more in every adult age group.

That does not mean snack foods explain the whole gap, and the survey does not divide the figures that way. But it does suggest that what sits in a desk drawer is a fibre question as much as a sugar one. The NHS covers the practical side in its guidance on getting more fibre into your diet.

What does the data not show?

Several important things.

Purchases are not consumption. Family Food counts what came through the door for a household, divided by the number of people in it. It does not know who ate it, or whether it was eaten at all.

Some regional cells are fragile. The published dataset carries a relative standard error indicator against each figure. Several of the numbers above sit in the "high" band, meaning a relative standard error between 10% and 20%; the Welsh figure for nuts and seeds is flagged "very high", above 20%. A single year's regional difference is not a trend.

Nothing here links snacking to disease rates by area. Diabetes and cardiovascular disease do vary across the UK — the scale of each is set out by Diabetes UK and the British Heart Foundation — but grocery purchase data cannot explain that variation. Deprivation, age structure, smoking, physical activity and access to care all move together with food purchasing.

The central number is still missing. If someone says a quarter of British calories come from snacks, the first questions are which survey, which definition and which year. Usually the answer is one research paper using its own threshold, not a national statistic. How claims like that are checked before they appear here is set out in how we write.

Anyone with diabetes, raised cholesterol or another condition affected by diet should take individual questions to their GP or a registered dietitian rather than to a national average.

Where did this come from?

• National Diet and Nutrition Survey 2019 to 2023: report — GOV.UK
• National Diet and Nutrition Survey collection — GOV.UK
• Family Food FYE 2025 — DEFRA
• Family Food FYE 2025: about Family Food — DEFRA
• Family food datasets — DEFRA
• SACN Carbohydrates and Health report — GOV.UK
• How to get more fibre into your diet — NHS
• Diabetes statistics — Diabetes UK
• Heart statistics — British Heart Foundation