The crafting of nutritional recommendations by public health authorities for the general public offers an opportunity to better understand public action in food policy by considering the complex links between scientific, administrative and industrial actors. These relationships are commonly perceived as difficult for public authorities, who are often confronted with the food industry’s lobbying. The case of nutritional recommendations exemplifies a pragmatic strategy implemented by public authorities. Modest and inclusive, this strategy highlights the limited reactions of industrial actors, who adapt to the new recommendations, much more than they denounce them. Based on in-depth interviews with civil servants, experts and food industry professionals, as well as drawing from a corpus of formal letters sent by industrial actors to public authorities, this article highlights how despite the strengthening of regulatory capacities this has been accompanied by only a moderate usage of regulatory instruments.