ARLINGTON, Va. — The country’s biggest food companies will adhere to new marketing guidelines curbing advertising of unhealthy products for children.

The country’s biggest food companies will adhere to new marketing guidelines curbing advertising of unhealthy products for children.

The Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), whose participants include Coca-Cola Co., Unilever and Hershey Co., will follow uniform nutrition criteria, designed by the group and top food industry scientists and nutritionists, to strengthen voluntary efforts to change child-directed food advertising. The move follows the group’s rejection of similar guidelines that were suggested by the federal government.

About one in three products currently advertised to children do not meet the new nutrition criteria. While individual companies already have nutrition criteria for the products they advertise, the new uniform criteria will require many to change the recipes of these products to be able to continue advertising them after December 31, 2013. The new criteria encourage development of products with less sodium, saturated fat and sugars, and fewer calories.

"These uniform nutrition criteria represent another huge step forward, further strengthening voluntary efforts to improve child-directed advertising," says CFBAI vice president and director Elaine Kolish. "Now foods from different companies, such as cereals or canned pastas, will meet the same nutrition criteria, rather than similar but slightly different company-specific criteria. The new criteria are comprehensive, establishing limits for calories, saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and total sugars as well as requirements for nutrition components."

The result of a yearlong effort to further improve the nutrition composition of food advertised to children, the criteria take into account food science, U.S. dietary guidelines and the difficulties of changing recipes.