Purpose: Unhealthy eating and lifestyle as well as low physical activity is a growing problem and are estimated to be among the primary causes for the growth in obesity and overweight among the adult population. In the ‘settings approach’ institutions such as the workplace are seen as arenas in which eating behavioural patterns can be influenced. This arena tends to grow in importance as more companies provide workplace food with increasing nutritional attention and develop not only lunch offers, but also take away offers. However settings based scientific literature has shown that interventions tend to give only modest effect when sustainability of intervention is used as a measure.

Methods: The paper is based on a review of literature on workplace healthy eating based projects and research, mainly with focus on Sweden and Denmark carried out in the Good Food at Work project.

Results: Important elements in this kind of interventions are management commitment, education, supporting organisational structures, employee participation, and integrated perspective on risk factors at the workplace and the everyday life of employees.

Discussion: The paper suggests that a socio nutritional approach to promotion of healthy eating at workplace is needed if workplace interventions are to be successful. It argues that a socio-technical approach (Clausen and Yoshinaka, 2007) where innovation is considered as a multi-stakeholder process in which interaction between the social constitution of the workplace (Seltz & Hildebrandt, 1989), the change agents, and societal influence (Thorsen et al, 2005) play an important role in the shaping of healthy workplace eating.