Get Cheshire Eating Well Strategy 2026-2031
Strategic themes
Eating Well Systems – leadership, governance, and integration
- Concerns the broader strategies, policies, and systems that influence healthy weight.
- Ensures that healthy weight is embedded within organisational, institutional, and policy frameworks.
Key to healthy weight systems are system-wide working, data and insight, monitoring and evaluation, learning and impact.
Particular focus will be given to the system levers most likely to create lasting change, including procurement, commissioning, planning policy, healthier food environments, organisational leadership and implementation of the Healthy Weight Declaration.
The aim is to embed eating well across all policies, services, and sectors, supporting residents at every life stage.
1.1 Establish Governance and Strategic Leadership
- Establish a Get Cheshire West Eating Well Steering Group, reporting into Eat Well Be Active.
- Agree Group Terms of Reference, membership and chair.
- Complete quarterly meetings over a 5-year strategic period with a 2-year refresh.
- Achieve formal endorsement for the strategy framework.
1.2 Whole-System Strategic Alignment
- Embed eating well across all organisational strategies, by adopting an Eating Well in All Policies approach (including the Healthy Weight Declaration).
- Use procurement and commissioning processes to support healthier, more sustainable and locally sourced food where possible.
- Align delivery across key life-course settings:
- Early years and family services
- Schools and education
- WorkplacesVCFSE Sector
- Health and social care (including older adults)
- Continue and build upon whole-system working and partnerships.
- Support initiatives that reduce edible food waste and maximise redistribution of surplus food.
- Continue to develop Cheshire West and Chester as a leading Sustainable Food Place where healthy, sustainable and affordable food contributes to improved health, prosperity and environmental sustainability.
- Align delivery across neighbourhoods and place-based partnerships to improve outcomes within local communities.
1.3 Consistent, Compassionate Communication
- Develop consistent messaging across all life stages, for all stakeholders and all settings; ensuring clear and comprehensive healthy eating messages are aligned with government guidelines. Ensure messaging is age-appropriate (children, young people, adults, older people) and culturally relevant.
- Avoid weight-centric language; focus on health, energy, wellbeing, enjoyment and independence in later life.
- Promote compassionate, non-stigmatising approaches to communication.
- Centralise information into a single accessible hub or platform for partners and communities.
1.4 Data, Insight and Intelligence
- Produce an annual Eating Well progress report and review priorities every two years.
- Develop a shared dataset covering the life course:
- Infant feeding and early years nutrition
- School food uptake and child diets
- Adult diets
- Food access
- Older adult nutrition (e.g. malnutrition risk)
- Strengthen insight into inequalities and seldom heard groups.
- Identify, monitor and respond to food insecurity across the borough through coordinated action with partners.
1.5 Community Partnerships and Lived Experience
- Embed lived experience in governance and decision making.
- Strengthen community food partnerships.
- Build on existing community food support networks and local voluntary sector capacity.
- Ensure dignity-based approaches across services.
1.6 Integration with Health and Care
- Embed nutrition into routine care across the life course:
- Pre-conception, maternity, health visiting and early years
- Education
- Primary care, including community pharmacies
- Secondary care
- Community services
- Adult social care and older people's services
- Strengthen Make Every Contact Count (MECC) approaches across services to deliver health, wellbeing and welfare brief advice and service signposting.
- Regularly review the weight management offer for residents, exploring ways to communicate and increase engagement with the programmes.
- Integrate food and healthy diet with other services, including mental health, housing, welfare and financial support.
- Build nutrition and healthy eating skills across the wider workforce, including education, VCFSE, care and community settings.
1.7 Capacity and Sustainability
- Ensure sustainability of delivery across system reforms - mitigate threats from NHS reforms and sector financial efficiencies by embedding healthy weight as a cross-cutting priority in organisational plans.
- Support innovation, research and evaluation to continuously improve the Eating Well approach.
- Identify and pursue external funding, research opportunities and grant programmes that support food security, food growing, healthy food access, sustainable food systems, community resilience and health inequalities reduction.
Eating Well Environments – shaping access and availability
- Focuses on the physical spaces and infrastructure that support healthy weight.
- Involves development, accessibility, communication, and sustainability of spaces that are conducive to eating well and being active.
Key to eating well environments are settings, communities and infrastructure conducive to eating well.
The aim is to create environments that support healthy eating at every stage of life.
2.1 Access and Affordability
- Expand affordable food initiatives.
- Improve access to healthy, affordable and dietarily appropriate food.
- Improve transport and active travel connections to food provision.
- Strengthen community food provision and support.
- Work with partners to prevent and reduce food insecurity through coordinated local responses.
- Integrate food support with wider welfare and health services.
- Increase availability of locally produced healthy food.
- Increase opportunities for residents and communities to grow food.
2.2 Planning, Infrastructure and Food Systems
- Embed healthy food access within planning and regeneration.
- Shape healthier local food environments.
- Reduce exposure to unhealthy food environments.
- Promote sustainable and affordable dietary patterns.
- Support sustainable local food systems.
- Use procurement and commissioning to improve food environments.
- Protect and incorporate food-growing opportunities through planning policy and development.
2.3 Food in Public and Community Settings
- Improve food provision in leisure centres, community venues and public buildings.
- Work with the private sector to support healthier offers, particularly through vending and procurement.
- Expand access to free drinking water.
2.4 Early Years Settings
- Strengthen healthy food provision in nurseries and childcare settings.
- Support healthy early feeding practices and provide consistent guidance for parents.
- Promote good nutrition and oral health through integrated early years support.
- Maximise uptake of Healthy Start through proactive identification, promotion and support.
2.5 Schools and Education Settings
- Ensure children have access to healthy school meals and healthy food during school holidays, including maximising uptake of Free School Meals and the Holiday Activity and Food Programme provision.
- Ensure consistent healthy food environments across all education settings including primary, secondary and colleges.
- Address influences on children’s choices, particularly in terms of food availability, marketing, and peer influence.
- Strengthen links between food education, cooking skills and school culture.
- Encourage school food growing, edible gardens and orchard projects alongside cooking and nutrition education.
2.6 Workplace Food Environments
- Support workplaces to improve catering and vending and to promote healthy eating.
- Embed eating well within workplace wellbeing.
- Recognise workplaces as key system drivers to improving population dietary health.
2.7 Commercial Influences
- Further strengthen advertising policies locally.
- Advocate for, and support, national action on planning and licencing of less healthy food and drink outlets.
- Advocate for, and support, national action on marketing and promotions.
- Advocate for, and support, national action on commercial sponsorship of grassroots sport and school initiatives.
2.8 Reducing Barriers
- Address key barriers identified for families, including:
- Cost of food
- Time pressures
- Lack of cooking facilities
- Transport challenges
- Focus on making healthy eating realistic for families’ daily lives.
Eating Well People and Communities – supporting capability across the life course
- Focuses on individuals and community-level action to engage people in healthy behaviours.
- Emphasise inclusion, cultural shifts, partnerships, and addressing barriers to participation, ensuring that diverse populations are engaged.
Key to healthy weight systems is engagement, co-creation, safe and inclusive experiences, asset-based community development.
The aim is to support people at every stage of life with the skills, confidence, and opportunity to eat well.
3.1 Early Years and Families (Start Well)
- Support breastfeeding, healthy introduction of solid food and early eating habits.
- Provide consistent support through health visiting and Family Hubs.
- Work with childcare settings as opportunities to influence dietary patterns.
- Support parents and carers as key influencers in their child’s diet, whilst recognising the challenges that the wider environments present.
3.2 Children and Young People
- Build food knowledge, cooking skills and confidence in trying new foods.
- Support healthy habits that continue into adulthood.
- Develop and support peer champion opportunities through schools, colleges, youth services and community settings.
3.3 Working-Age Adults (Live Well)
- Provide support that reflects real life, particularly time pressures, cost constraints and work patterns.
- Promote behaviour change focused on habits and wellbeing.
- Support people out of work to eat well and build positive routines.
- Identify key transition points in adulthood where habits may change and explore opportunities to influence.
3.4 Older Adults (Age Well)
- Support nutrition for independence, preventing malnutrition and managing long-term conditions.
- Integrate nutrition into adult social care and community health services.
- Address isolation, access, and mobility barriers.
- Identify key transition points in adulthood where habits may change and explore opportunities to influence.
3.5 People living with a physical or learning disability
- Support nutrition for independence and enjoyment, whilst also supporting conditions they may have.
- Take a whole-person approach, supporting the individual, the carer and addressing the environment in which they spend time.
3.6 Skills, Confidence and Food Literacy
- Increase cooking skills across all ages, focussing on those who need it most.
- Provide budgeting support, meal planning and practical non-judgemental advice – ensure this is done in a variety of ways to support different cohorts and needs.
- Explore opportunities to combine healthy eating support with nature-based activities, green social prescribing, community gardening and outdoor wellbeing programmes.
3.7 Support wider drivers of poor diet
- Acknowledge and support the impact that routine, sleep and stress can have on dietary choices.
- Embed psychology and holistic approaches, incorporating mindful eating, confidence building, routines, sleep support, stress management and motivational support into support services.
3.8 Community Empowerment and Co-Production
- Support and expand community-led food growing, orchard, food-sharing and cooking initiatives through local leadership and volunteer programmes.
- Embed co-production with residents across all age groups, building on the Cheshire West Voluntary Action Food Ambassadors Programme and applying the principles of the Local Voices Framework.
- Tell local stories to build relatability, motivation, and community buy-in.
Ambitions
For Cheshire West and Chester to be a place where eating well is the norm, we will:
- Make eating well an easier choice for residents.
- Empower and enable leaders to ensure eating well is embedded within systems, advocating for eating well champions at all levels.
- Support the development of health promoting environments and local infrastructure that encourage people to eat well, more often.
- Reduce inequalities in accessing and affording healthy food.
- Work with a wide range of partners including health, social care, voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise (VCFSE) organisations and businesses to embed eating well into daily life for all.
- Work with communities to understand how best to support them to eat well and empower them to do so.
- Ensure that education and work settings understand the value of eating well and actively promote it.
- Enable local food producers, growers and retailers to thrive, increasing local procurement.
- Monitor and evaluate, share good practice, learn from challenges and innovate.
How will we get there?
Getting more people to eat well will take a system-wide coordinated approach. The action plan below is presented in themes and high-level actions which are underpinned by a series of deliverables which are detailed in an accompanying plan.
The strategy will be owned and delivered by system partners across the borough, in partnership with local organisations and communities. Local voices will continue to shape the delivery plan for the next five years, to ensure the strategy is meaningful, relevant and impactful for local people. Eat Well Be Active partners are committed to increasing eating well for all, thus reducing diet-related ill-health and inequalities.
Delivery will build upon existing strengths across Cheshire West and Chester, including Family Hubs, Integrated Neighbourhood Teams, social prescribing, neighbourhood health approaches, community food partnerships and wider prevention programmes. These existing assets will act as key delivery mechanisms for the strategy, helping to maximise impact, strengthen integration and avoid duplication.
The delivery plan will be a working document, annually reviewed and refreshed to align with new insight and learning, enhanced partnerships and resource.
