Description
Consumer understanding is at the heart of our innovation and renovation agenda to deliver food and beverage products that are appealing and tasty to our consumers and that have a better nutritional quality. This goes hand in hand with continuous investments in new technologies, together with third parties, allowing us to develop these products now and in the future.
Unilever's nutritional commitments are embedded in the innovation and reformulation roadmaps of our brands, where specific guardrails are set for our product categories, with clear governance.
The World Health Organization (WHO)-aligned nutrition standards refer to product levels of salt, saturated fat, trans fats, added or total sugar and kilocalories that are aligned with WHO international dietary guidelines and are therefore aligned with our strict Unilever Highest Nutrition Standards (HNS). We evaluate the content of these nutrients in our food and beverage products based on the nutritional specifications. These specifications are the basis for nutrient-level disclosures on our product packaging or websites.
All Unilever products worldwide, so all brands in all countries, are in scope for this commitment as well as the products marketed under our joint venture with PepsiCo on Lipton.
Overarching commitment (for commitments submitted pre-2025)
Title
Reduce calories, salt and sugar
Description
We envision a regenerative and equitable food system producing healthy, safe and nutritious food for all. We want to contribute positively to the transformation of the food system through innovation and reformulation by continuously providing food products with higher nutritional value and lower environmental footprints as well as reducing nutrients of public health concern. In this commitment, we focus on further reduction of nutrients of public health concern, such as salt, sugar, saturated and trans fats as well as calories.
Unilever's nutrition improvement journey began over 20 years ago when we published our Nutrition Policy followed by our Nutrition Enhancement Programme in 2003. We reviewed all our products worldwide to assess their salt, sugar and saturated/trans fat content and defined actions for improvements. This led to us setting time-bound targets in our Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP), and by the end of 2020, we had doubled the size of our portfolio of products that meet our HNS. This meant we improved our portfolio from 30% to 61% compliancy to our HNS, measured on volume sold in tons.
We received recognition for our achievements and were called out in the Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNI) Global Index 2021 for our nutrient profile and achieved commitments in the USLP, which guided the company and many others in the industry for 10 years. Unilever’s full-edged nutrient profiling model, HNS, contributes to the company obtaining the highest ‘healthy multiplier’ possible in ATNI's methodology.
We do not believe there is room for being complacent, and we want to take the next step to further drive down the salt, sugar and calorie content of our products, resulting in a compliance with HNS of 70% by the end of 2022. This commitment is aligned with Unilever’s Responsible Business Pledge under the Product (Re)formulation and Innovation for Improved Nutrition commitment area.
GNR assessment
| Verification status |
Verified
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|---|---|
| SMARTness index |
High
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Details
| Global nutrition target(s) |
Adult obesity
Salt/sodium intake
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|---|---|
| Nutrition Action Classification(s) |
Policy >
Food supply chain
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| Linked event(s) |
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| N4G Summit theme(s) |
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Measurement
| Key indicator | Percentage of annual sales volume (tons sold) of Unilever's food and refreshment products meeting the criteria for HNS |
|---|---|
| Measurement plan | Collect own data |
| Value | Measurement date | |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 61% | 2020 |
| Target | 70% | September 2022 |
Progress
| Value | Measurement date | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Progress report | 64% | September 2022 |
Not Reached
The progress report indicates the target was not reached by the end date.
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