Salt, or the art of blaming the wrong culprit.

Two scenes, years apart, built on the same gesture. The first at Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Beşiktaş, Istanbul. The raised arm, the salt running down the forearm before it lands on the meat. It is theatrical, and it works: the gesture became a global meme after a video in January 2017, and a restaurant chain across a dozen countries.

The second this summer in Gruissan, a stone's throw from the salt marshes. A customer asks for salt. The waitress replies: "Have you tasted it?"

After sugar and fat, I wanted to look at salt. Starting with what it brings, before talking about what we want to take away from it.

What salt actually does.

Sodium is an essential nutrient. It contributes to fluid balance, plasma volume, nerve transmission and muscle contraction. In 2019 EFSA set a reference value of 2 g of sodium per day for adults, roughly 5 g of salt. Below a very low threshold the body breaks down: exercise-associated hyponatraemia, well documented among endurance runners, affected 8 % of participants in one ultra-trail event studied, with one case down to 122 mmol/L of serum sodium.

In the kitchen and in the factory, salt does more than make things salty. It enhances flavour, balances sweetness and masks bitterness. It preserves, by reducing the water available to micro-organisms. It gives structure, by controlling fermentation and dough texture in bakery, by solubilising the proteins that bind and emulsify in charcuterie, by driving draining and ripening in cheesemaking. Taking salt out of a recipe therefore means touching four functions at once, and that is the whole difficulty of the subject.

Salt also has a technological history. Before refrigeration, it made preservation possible, which meant surviving winter and trading at distance. Salting, brining and lacto-fermentation are humanity's first food technologies.

Iodine, or the story of a forgotten deficiency.

And then there is iodine, still one of the great public health successes of the twentieth century.

The soil of the Alpine valleys was leached of its iodine by glacial erosion some twelve thousand years ago. The deficiency there was therefore massive and ancient: Juvenal, in the second century, already wrote "who is surprised at a goitre in the Alps?"

The figures are striking. Before iodisation, up to 90 % of inhabitants of the high Alpine valleys had a goitre, and around 2 % the full form of the disease, with severe developmental delay. The Napoleonic census of Valais in 1810 counts about 4,000 cases for 70,000 inhabitants. Around 1850, some 20,000 people were estimated to be affected in the French mountain areas. This was a deficiency disease, massive and entirely avoidable.

The French expression "crétin des Alpes" was born of that health history. Its dominant etymology, retained by the Bloch and Wartburg dictionary, traces "crétin" to the Valais word cretin, matching the French "chrétien", used first out of compassion before becoming an insult. George Sand already uses it in her 1838 correspondence. It is an insult whose origin is a public health failure, and which outlived the disease it named.

The way out is Swiss. In 1914, Heinrich Hunziker identified iodine deficiency as the cause of goitre. In 1918, a country doctor in Valais, Otto Bayard, added potassium iodide to the cooking salt of the schoolchildren of Grächen and demonstrated that it worked. The Swiss Goitre Commission recommended iodisation in June 1922, and the first deliveries of iodised salt left the Swiss Rhine Salt Works in November 1922. By the 1930s, not a single birth with cretinism was recorded in Switzerland.

The effect has even been quantified, and the number is dizzying. A study by Feyrer, Politi and Weil, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, uses the geographic variation in iodine deficiency of American soils together with military records from both world wars. It concludes that salt iodisation raised IQ by roughly one standard deviation, in the order of fifteen points, among the most deficient quarter of the population, and that on its own it explains about a decade of the trend rise in US IQ.

A simple composition adjustment on an ingredient worth a few cents a kilo.

Here is the point almost nobody connects to today's salt reduction debate: 70 to 80 % of the salt we eat comes from processed products, and therefore from non-iodised salt.— Audrey Le Borgne, MaïMaï Consulting, September 2026

In France, iodisation is not mandatory. It has been authorised since 1952, capped at 15 to 20 mg of iodine per kilo, and banned in the salt used in manufactured foods. In 2014, iodised salts accounted for 32 % of table and cooking salt sales.

On 28 June 2024, WHO Europe issued an explicit alert: the risk of iodine deficiency is rising again across the region, driven by the combined effect of falling dairy consumption and the low iodisation rate of the salt used by industry. In Germany, only 9 % of the salt in processed products is iodised. Twenty-four European countries have no mandatory iodisation policy at all.

A review published in Nutrients in 2024 proposes the missing rule: raise the iodine level as salt consumption falls, from 20 mg/kg at 10 g of salt a day to around 60 mg/kg at 3 g a day. The message fits in five words: use iodised salt, but less.

The excess, though, is real.

None of this cancels the opposite problem.

The WHO recommends less than 5 g of salt a day. Average world consumption is around 10.8 g, and the organisation attributed 1.7 million deaths to excess sodium in 2023. The 30 % reduction target set for 2025 was not met and has been pushed back to 2030.

In France, the last official measurement is the ANSES INCA 3 study published in 2017: 9 g a day for men, 7 g for women. No more recent data has been published since, with the Albane survey due to take over. An entire industry is steering its reformulation with a nine-year-old snapshot.

An honest caveat, since the subject is contested: the relationship between sodium and mortality is the object of a real scientific debate. The PURE cohort analyses, published in The Lancet in 2018 on 94,000 people across 18 countries, conclude that risk only rises above 5 g of sodium a day, roughly 12.5 g of salt. The team of He, MacGregor and Cappuccio vigorously contests that reading and defends a linear relationship. There is no consensus on the lower threshold; there is one on the fact that populations in excess must reduce.

The salt that counts is still not the salt in the shaker. In France, bread and dry bakery account for around a quarter of intake from food, ahead of charcuterie and ready meals at around 12 %, then cheese at around 8 %. In the United Kingdom, the British Heart Foundation points out that 85 % of the salt consumed is already present in the products bought. The lever therefore sits in the recipes, well before the shaker.

The salami strategy, and why it works.

French bread deserves credit, because it is one of the few examples in the world of a reformulation whose effect has been measured and published.

The method is the salami one: take off a slice, let the palate adjust, start again. A 2014 agreement targeted 18 g of salt per kilo of flour. A collective agreement signed in March 2022 set progressive thresholds: 1.40 g of salt per 100 g for standard breads, 1.30 g for wholemeal, 1.10 g for sandwich loaves.

The review published in May 2026 by the French food observatory measures standard breads at 1.27 g per 100 g, down 25 % between 2015 and 2024, wholemeal at 1.17 g and sandwich loaves at 1.00 g. Compliance rates range from 81.7 % to 96.7 % depending on the type.

A model led by Clémence Grave at Santé publique France, published in Hypertension on 26 January 2026, puts a number on the gain: 8,400 cardiovascular and renal hospital admissions avoidable every year with full compliance, 136,000 hospital days, 11,300 years of life lost. At the current compliance rate, the study already counts 949 deaths avoided.

And here is the part brands should read twice. While the salt in bread fell by a quarter, the sector did not collapse. The 2025 Fiducial observatory reports an average of 313 customers a day against 297 in 2024, and an average basket of €6.33 against €5.92.

Careful not to confuse coincidence with causality. No source shows that salt reduction contributed to the sector's health, and the identified drivers are elsewhere: snacking, present in 81 % of outlets, premiumisation, the new-wave bakeries. Grocery retail now captures 50 % of bread sales, which remains the real threat to the artisan trade.

What the bread case proves is simpler, and more useful: a slow, well-run reduction is invisible to the consumer. The text of the 2014 agreement said so already, calling for a gradual extension to preserve "consumer acceptability" and avoid "stigmatising" bread. The commercial fear was explicit. It did not materialise.

What brands have done, and what it cost them.

The figures exist, and they go back a long way.

Herta publishes its reductions product by product, with the starting year: minus 25 % salt on Le Bon Paris ham since 2002, minus 41 % on lardons, minus 22 % on Knacki since 2005, minus 45 to 50 % on pastry doughs since 2008. In parallel the brand ran a nitrite removal programme, launched in 2017 after five years of research, which represented a quarter of its charcuterie sales in 2020. Worth noting for technical readers: nitrite and salt both act as a microbiological barrier, which makes the two programmes hard to run at the same time, even if Herta publishes no data on that trade-off.

Nestlé removed 22.7 % of the sodium from its global portfolio between 2005 and 2012, or 5,950 tonnes, then targeted a further 10 % over 2013-2016. On Maggi noodles in New Zealand and Australia, 38 tonnes of sodium have been removed since 2005, with some varieties reaching minus 55 %.

Unilever announced in January 2020 that 85 % of its global food portfolio would help consumers stay under 5 g of salt a day, a target reached at 91 % in the US market in 2021. Knorr sells a salt-free stock range in France with a Nutri-Score B, and a vegetable stock at minus 30 % salt, at 0.57 g per 100 g.

Fleury Michon offers the clearest B2C case: a commitment made on 27 September 2018 to move its entire charcuterie range, 181 references, to 25 % less salt than the market average, with a public timetable and a 2020 deadline. The reduction was put forward on pack, not hidden.

Cheese remains the blind spot. The fourth contributor of salt in France at around 8 % of intake, it is covered by no public, quantified industry commitment, and neither Savencia nor the Bel group publishes salt reduction data comparable to that of charcuterie. The reason is first of all technical, and it is serious: salt drives draining, since one gram of added salt pulls out four to five grams of water, and it selects the ripening flora. The room for manoeuvre is one percentage point. Below 0.5 % salt in the cheese, Pseudomonas fluorescens and spoilage flora develop. Above 1.5 %, the product is too salty. The cheesemaker works inside that margin, and the Nutri-Score penalises them without offering a technical answer.

Which leaves the question every executive asks: what does it earn?

First it has to be said what it costs. Every reduction step is paid for in years of research, repeated consumer tests, shortened shelf life, recipes to redo. The clean label constraint rules out part of the available technical substitutes. An article from January 2026 quoted the head of the British bakers' federation: the technical functionality of salt sets a floor, the first reductions were easy, the next ones are slow and expensive.

The UK Department of Health puts the expected health benefits of the HFSS rules at £57 billion. One study measured a 0.63 percentage point fall in the share of affected products in sales by weight, roughly 2 million fewer products sold every day. On 4 July 2022 the High Court ruled that mixing a sugary cereal with milk does not make it less sugary. Kellogg's did not appeal: four of its five best sellers are now outside the HFSS scope. KP Snacks developed 110 non-HFSS references, a quarter of its portfolio, and Birds Eye moved 80 % of its pizza range out of scope.

The British lesson, and its flip side.

The United Kingdom is the world reference on this subject, in both directions.

Between 2003 and 2014, under the Food Standards Agency and with targets set for 85 product categories, average salt consumption fell from 9.38 to 7.58 g a day, a 19 % drop.

Then in 2014, stewardship was handed to industry through the Public Health Responsibility Deal. Consumption climbed back to 8.39 g a day in 2018. Researchers at Queen Mary estimate that staying on the original trajectory could have avoided more than 38,000 stroke and heart disease deaths between 2014 and 2018.

An Oxford analysis covering 8,000 to 9,500 products a year confirms the stall: between 2015 and 2020, the average salt content of British products fell by only 4.2 %, a statistically non-significant result. Bread fell by just 1.6 %. Ready meals, soups and pizzas actually rose by 1.2 %. A telling detail: 37 % of the fall in total salt sold comes from falling sales of salty products, not from reformulation.

Self-regulation alone does not hold the trajectory. A brand betting on the absence of future constraint is taking a risk.

The false friends of reduction.

This is the most useful part of the file, because each of these routes looks like a solution and is not one.

The sodium that is not salt.

A study published on 21 March 2025 in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition lists 88 additives authorised in the European Union that contain sodium, 4 % of them at high levels, above 40 %. Bicarbonate and baking powder in pastry, phosphates and nitrite in charcuterie, glutamate, benzoate, citrate, alginate. The authors stress that no composition analysis tells you what share of the sodium comes from sodium chloride and what share comes from additives. The direct consequence for a brand: a "less salt" claim calculated on added cooking salt alone can turn out to be hollow if the product's total sodium has not moved. The calculation has to be done on total sodium. It is the most serious reputational risk in the category.

The "salt" line on the label.

The European INCO regulation requires salt to be declared, not sodium. Except that this figure is obtained by multiplying the product's total sodium by 2.5, whatever its origin. The "salt" line therefore also contains the sodium from additives, with no way to separate them. The consumer thinks they are reading cooking salt; they are reading a sodium equivalent.

One court case shows how far the misunderstanding goes: the Lyon administrative court of appeal ruled on 21 November 2013 on the Vichy waters. The manufacturer was communicating that Saint-Yorre contains only 0.53 g of salt per litre and Vichy Célestins 0.39 g. The court accepted that these figures were accurate, and still found them misleading: they only measure the sodium bound to chloride, whereas most of the sodium in those waters is bound to bicarbonate. Accurate in the strict sense, false in the useful one.

So-called natural salts.

Himalayan pink salt, Celtic salt, fleur de sel and sea salt contain practically as much sodium as table salt. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health gives, per teaspoon, 2,300 mg of sodium for fine iodised salt, 2,200 mg for Himalayan pink, 2,120 mg for fine sea salt. The gap is negligible, and these salts are not iodised. The only real advantage of fleur de sel is gastronomic, and it is entirely legitimate: it is dosed as a finishing touch, so in smaller quantity.

Umami and fermented condiments.

Soy sauce contains around 18 g of sodium per 100 g. One tablespoon delivers 920 to 1,160 mg of sodium, or 40 to 50 % of the recommended daily limit. Miso sits at around 9 g of salt per 100 g, with fish sauce and colatura in the same range. Umami, identified by Kikunae Ikeda in 1908, is a taste: it enriches perception, it does not remove sodium. Reduced versions exist, such as Kikkoman's reduced-salt soy sauce at more than 43 % less salt, 9.2 g per 100 ml, and they remain salty products.

The light version that isn't.

Action on Salt published an analysis of British cheddars in February 2024. Asda's "30 % Less Fat" cheddar contained 2 g of salt per 100 g, 38 % more than a competing standard cheddar at 1.44 g. Taking out fat is often paid for in salt, and the consumer choosing the lighter option is making a trade-off they do not know about.

Compensation at the table.

A study published in Public Health Nutrition in 2018 measured what people actually do with a reduced-salt soup. The net reduction achieved is still 29 %, which is good. But 18 % of participants, the ones who salt systematically, over-compensated to the point of increasing their salt intake by 30 % compared with the standard product. A "reduced salt" claim that is too visible can therefore authorise the very gesture it claims to prevent.

Extreme restriction.

A meta-analysis of nine trials presented at the American College of Cardiology in early 2023 associated, in heart failure patients, a diet under 2.5 g of sodium a day with 80 % excess mortality compared with standard recommendations. A conference result, to be handled with care, but a reminder that the target is not zero.

Meanwhile, salt is becoming a terroir product.

The commercial paradox of this category sits here. At the very moment public health asks for lower content, salt is enjoying the most structured premium positioning it has ever had.

Official signs have multiplied. Guérande salt has carried the Label Rouge since 1991 and a European PGI since 2012. The European Commission approved a double PGI for the salt and fleur de sel of the île de Ré in November 2023, then for the Camargue in February 2024. Noirmoutier obtained the Label Rouge in 2020.

The business model has been rebuilt around the product and the visit. On the île de Ré, the salt workers' cooperative saw sales rise 20 % in 2024, rolled out its new PGI identity in January 2025, opened a shop at Ars-en-Ré in autumn 2025 and launched marsh tours in 2026. In Gruissan, the salt works closed by Salins du Midi in 2004 was restarted by a master salt worker, Patrice Gabanou, who produces around 15,000 tonnes a year and welcomes some 160,000 visitors.

The value gap is spectacular. Guérande PGI fleur de sel goes beyond €20 a kilo, while artisanal coarse salt sits around €1.50 and industrial salt around one euro. The reason is physical: fleur de sel crystallises at the surface, is harvested by hand the same day, and a Guérande salt worker producing 60 to 90 tonnes of coarse salt only gets 2 to 3 tonnes of it.

This industry has a fragility that manufacturing does not: it depends on sun and wind. In 2024, yields fell to 80 kg per crystallising pan in Guérande against around a tonne in a normal year. In 2025, the season was stopped on 20 July by 10 cm of rain in two days. In 2026, conversely, June was the hottest June ever recorded in France and July the hottest and one of the driest, and Atlantic salt workers have harvested almost without interruption since 11 June. The same climate shift threatens the marshes through flooding: the Le Guérandais cooperative committed €100,000 in April 2026 to reinforce some thirty kilometres of dykes.

What this changes for a brand.

Salt is not a poison, and salt-free does not exist. Between the two, the decision is a mapping exercise before it is a technical one.

On every reference in the range, salt belongs to one of two regimes. Either it is seen, tasted and claimed, and its origin becomes a brand asset. Or it is not seen, and it is reduced slice by slice without saying so, because that is where the public health gain sits, and the right to stay visible in store tomorrow.

Five questions to ask before deciding:

1. On this reference, is salt perceptible and expected by the consumer, or invisible and simply endured?
2. Would a 5 % reduction go unnoticed in consumer testing, and over how many successive slices can that pace be held?
3. Has the product's total sodium been recalculated, additives included, or only the added sodium chloride?
4. How much shelf life does this reduction cost, and how do you explain that without degrading the promise?
5. If salt origin is claimed on pack, does supply survive a year like 2024?

Sugar was handled through replacement. Fat was handled through sorting. Salt will be handled the salami way, and through geography: that of the range, and that of the marsh.

And for the rest, the waitress in Gruissan was right. Taste it first.